The New Zealand Time Use Survey

Press Release - 16 December 1999

The Press, 15 December 1999, has a headline that "Women work harder, survey finds". The Dominion claims, "Women's work takes twice as long". The Statistics New Zealand press release states that, "Men average two hours more paid work per day than women, while women spend two hours more per day doing unpaid work". The results are being distorted before the proverbial ink is dry. What is the real story?

The time use survey was conducted between July 1998 and July 1999, by Statistics New Zealand under a $2 million contract to the Ministry of Women's Affairs. It has been described by Marilyn Waring as: "the most sophisticated and conceptually advanced time use survey of all. This will be the single most exciting information base established as a vehicle for change in my lifetime."

Waring may consider the study to be conceptually advanced, but much of the information is unusable. Early claims of possible uses of the information cannot be supported.

The survey uses the household as a defining criterion, rather than the family. There are a large number of families where the parents do not live together in the same household, as indicated by the more than 200,000 parents who are paying child support. However the survey gives different treatment for caring depending on whether the children live in the same or another household. This might explain participating men's longer average time spent caring for children from another household (40% more than women for a child under 5). 

People can be involved in several activities at the same time. Time spent on an activity does not then reflect its importance. Surveys commonly ask people to specify the relative importance of simultaneous activities, but not in this case. Instead, the Ministry of Women's Affairs determined the order of priorities for the various possible activities, with the primary activity being defined as whichever of the activities undertaken is highest on the Ministry's list.

The approach leads to some anomalous results. One subcategory of caregiving for household members is, “available for care of household members”. It appears that this would rank above actually undertaking household work. The primary activity of someone doing household work while a child sleeps would be "caregiving". Not so for someone working from home while actively caring for children in the household. The recorded primary activity is then "labour force activity". A non-custodial parent actively caring for a child while undertaking household work would have a primary activity of household work, with childcare being "informal unpaid work outside the home".

Among some of the things the survey cannot tell us are:

• Whether the time spent on unpaid work is productively and efficiently used.
• What the self-perceived priorities are during multiple activities, and which activities took most effort or concentration.
• Differences in workload according to: the number of adults and children in a household; relationship of the adults to the children; the nature of the relationship between the adults (recently married, de facto, reconstituted family…).

·        Relative parenting contributions of custodial and non-custodial parents.

• Total time spent on caregiving.
• The amount of paid childcare undertaken.
• Household incomes.
• Whether the children in the household spend much time living in another household.

The use of “household” as a classifying unit and the absence of clear identifiers of family relationships seriously limits the usefulness of the information provided by the survey.

However, the most significant problem is the method of determination of “primary activity”. This arises because of people’s simultaneous engagement in several activities. The survey does not determine people’s assessment of the relative importance of these, nor of their allocation of effort over them. Instead, it imposes the Ministry of Women’s Affairs’ own ranking of activities irrespective of individual preferences or effort. For some issues, the ranking of an activity depends on the family situation (intact or living apart) of the people concerned. In a survey specifically intended to give clearer information on unpaid work, it is hard to see how this approach can be justified.

Stuart Birks

Director

Centre for Public Policy Evaluation