Question

A ‘time use survey’ was conducted in six states of our country. It shows that an average woman works every day for a little over seven and half hours while an average man works for six and a half hours. Yet the work done by men is more visible because most of their work leads to generation of income. Women also do a lot of direct income generating work, but the bulk of their work is household related. This work remains unpaid and invisible.

Daily time use (hours:minutes)

Activities	Men	Women
Income generating work	6:00	2:40
Household and related work	0:30	5:00
Talking, Gossip	1:25	1:20
No work/ Leisure	3:40	3:50
Sleep, self-care, reading etc.	12:25	11:10

You can conduct a similar time use survey in your own household. Observe all the adult male and female members of your family for one week. Every day note down the number of hours each of them spends on the following activities: income generating activity (working at the office or shop or factory or field, etc.), household related activity (cooking, cleaning, washing, fetching water, looking after children or elders, etc.), reading and recreation, talking/gossiping, self-care, taking rest or sleeping. If necessary make new categories. Add up the time taken on each activity for a week and calculate the daily average for each activity for each member. Do women work more in your family as well?

Answer 1

Guidelines:

Step 1: Create a 7-Day Tracking Sheet

Draw a basic log table on a rough piece of paper to track the hours manually every night for one week.

Example Tracking Table (For 1 Member):

Day	Income generating activity	Household related activity	Reading and recreation	Talking/Gossiping	Self-care
Mon	7:00	1:00	1:30	0:30	12:00
Tue	8:00	0:30	1:00	1:00	11:30
(Repeat till Sun)
Total	52:30	5:15	9:45	4:00	83:30

Step 2: Calculate the Daily Average

At the end of the week, add up the total hours for each category and divide by 7 to get the daily average.

Example Calculation: If your father worked a total of 52 hours and 30 minutes at his office over the whole week:

Daily Average = `(52.5 "hours")/(7 "days")`

= 7.5 hours or 7 hours 30 minutes