Abstract
This article uses random and fixed effects regressions with 743,788 observations from panels of East and West Germany, the UK, Australia, South Korea, Russia, Switzerland and the United States. It shows how the life satisfaction of men and especially fathers in these countries increases steeply with paid working hours. In contrast, the life satisfaction of childless women is less related to long working hours, while the life satisfaction of mothers hardly depends on working hours at all. In addition, women and especially mothers are more satisfied with life when their male partners work longer, while the life satisfaction of men hardly depend on their female partners’ work hours. These differences between men and women are starker where gender attitudes are more traditional. They cannot be explained through differences in income, occupations, partner characteristics, period or cohort effects. These results contradict role expansionist theory, which suggests that men and women profit similarly from moderate work hours; they support role conflict theory, which claims that men are most satisfied with longer and women with shorter work hours.
Highlights
How many hours of paid work are conducive to human flourishing? Working ever-longer hours eventually leaves people feeling spent; working too few may leave them feeling superfluous. Marx (1966 [1867]: 280) warned of the former, fearing that ever-increasing work hours eventually consume “all time for growth, development and physical health.” Keynes (2010 [1928]: 329) feared the opposite, predicting ever-shorter work hours to lead to “nervous breakdown of the sort which is already common enough in England and the Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.1 3 Vol.:(0123456789) M
The results are consistent with hypothesis 1 of role conflict theory: The life satisfaction of childless men increases more steeply with working hours and peaks at higher working hours than the life satisfaction of women, but only marginally so in East Germany
Hypothesis 2 of role conflict theory is consistent with data from the US, Australia, UK, West Germany, Switzerland and Korea, where fathers profit even more from higher working hours than childless men do
Summary
Working ever-longer hours eventually leaves people feeling spent; working too few may leave them feeling superfluous. More than 30 years later, Friedan (1963: 15) diagnosed how, in the stifling gender culture of the 1950s, Keynes’ fear had become reality, diagnosing middle class homemakers to have a widespread “sense of dissatisfaction” from being structurally constrained to stay out of the labor market. When women did enter the labor market, average female life satisfaction decreased (Stevenson and Wolfers 2009; Treas et al 2011: 111)
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