How do Older Adults Spend Their Time? Gender Gaps and Educational Gradients in Time Use in East Asian and Western Countries

Man-Yee Kan,Shohei Yoda,Ekaterina Hertog,Muzhi Zhou,Jiweon Jun,Kamila Kolpashnikova,Daniela Veronica Negraia

doi:10.1007/s12062-021-09345-3

Abstract

This study is the first to document how older adults in East Asian and Western societies spend their time, across four key dimensions of daily life, by respondent’s gender and education level. To do this, we undertook a pioneering effort and harmonized cross-sectional time-use data from East Asian countries (China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) with data from the Multinational Time Use Study (Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, United Kingdom, United States; to which we refer as Western countries), collected between 2000 and 2015. Findings from bivariate and multivariate models suggest that daily time budgets of East Asian older adults are different from their counterparts in most Western countries. Specifically, gender gaps in domestic work, leisure, and sleep time were larger in East Asian contexts, than in Western countries. Gender gaps in paid work were larger in China compared to all other regions. Higher levels of educational attainment were associated with less paid work, more leisure, and less sleep time in East Asian countries, while in Western countries they were associated with more paid work, less domestic work, and less sleep. Interestingly, Italy and Spain, two Southern European welfare regimes, shared more similarities with East Asian countries than with other Western countries. We interpret and discuss the implications of these findings for population aging research, and welfare policies.

Highlights

Time is one of the most important resources we have, and despite appearing to be distributed, social forces shape imbalances and inequalities in how we use time, affecting population health and well-being (Adjei et al, 2017; Blair-Loy et al, 2015; Chatzitheochari & Arber, 2009; Luyster et al, 2012; Ng & Popkin, 2012; Thompson & Dahling, 2019)
Most prior work examining daily time-use patterns has focused on working adults (Sullivan et al, 2018), and little is known about the lives of aging adults
Our aims were to make such advancements and document the daily time-use patterns of older populations at the intersection of gender and educational levels, using a crosscultural framework comparing East Asian and Western societies. We did this by harmonizing time-diary data collected between 2000 and 2015 from multiple national survey agencies in East Asia (China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea) with the Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS) capturing selected Western countries which we grouped based on their common welfare regimes (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Sainsbury, 1999): Democratic Liberal (Canada/UK/US), Social Democratic (Denmark/Finland/Norway), Conservative (France/the Netherlands), Southern European (Italy/Spain)

Summary

Introduction

Time is one of the most important resources we have, and despite appearing to be distributed, social forces shape imbalances and inequalities in how we use time, affecting population health and well-being (Adjei et al, 2017; Blair-Loy et al, 2015; Chatzitheochari & Arber, 2009; Luyster et al, 2012; Ng & Popkin, 2012; Thompson & Dahling, 2019). Prior work has mainly documented time-use patterns in Western societies (Adjei & Brand, 2018; Anxo et al 2011; Mattingly & Sayer, 2006), leaving a desert of knowledge about time-use budgets in other geo-cultural contexts like Asian countries, or the Global South (this pattern is changing, ). Because previous work examining linkages between welfare regimes and people’s daily lives has focused mainly on working adults (Kan et al, 2011), we know little about how older populations fare. These limitations are partly due to lack of, or difficulty in accessing quality time-use data. For consistency we capitalize Western, while recognizing that it is not a coherent geographic entity and not capitalizing it would be grammatically correct

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Conclusion