Who worked more: men or women? The answer is complicated

Who worked more historically—men or women? It sounds like a simple question. It is one of the hardest questions in the series.

Before modern time diaries, historians rarely have reliable hour-by-hour records. Agricultural work changed by season. Many people performed several jobs. Women combined childcare with productive work. Children contributed labour. Some work was paid. Some produced goods directly for the family. Some prevented the household from having to spend money. And many records simply ignored unpaid work.

So claims that medieval men worked exactly 42 hours while women worked 57—or anything equally precise—should immediately make us suspicious. We can still reconstruct the broad pattern. But we need humility about the numbers.

Work was not a nine-to-five job

Pre-industrial work followed different rhythms. Agriculture could be relentless during planting or harvest and lighter during other periods. Winter changed what work was possible. Daylight mattered. Weather mattered. Animals still required care on days when fieldwork stopped.

Domestic production continued year-round. Instead of thinking in terms of a modern forty-hour week, it is better to imagine overlapping cycles of market work, farm work, household production, care work, seasonal work, and irregular paid labour. Men and women participated differently in each.

Men’s work was often more externally visible

Male work is easier to reconstruct because historical documents recorded it more consistently: wages, occupations, guild membership, contracts, military service, tax records, and employment accounts. A man might be clearly identified as a labourer, carpenter, farmer, blacksmith, sailor, or mason. Women’s activities were less likely to become formal occupational labels.

This creates a measurement problem. The 1900 U.S. Census illustrates it clearly. Enumerators were specifically told not to classify a woman who kept house for her own family as a housekeeper unless she received wages for doing so. Her work existed. It simply disappeared from the employment count.

Women combined many kinds of work

Women’s historical workload often combined food preparation, cleaning, water collection, fuel work, laundry, textile production, gardening, animal care, childcare, healthcare, paid labour, market activity, and seasonal agriculture.

Some could be performed simultaneously. A woman might watch a child while spinning. That makes time measurement difficult. If she spent an hour nursing an infant while repairing clothing, is that one hour of childcare, one hour of textile work, or two hours of work? Modern time-use researchers still face this problem. Historical researchers face it without diaries.

Men faced long and physically demanding work

The correction should not swing too far. Recognizing women’s hidden labour does not mean men enjoyed easy lives. Male agricultural and industrial work could involve extremely long days and severe physical demands.

Harvest seasons could run from daylight until dark. Mining was dangerous. Seafaring meant long absences. Construction and forestry were physically punishing. Early factory schedules could exceed modern working hours considerably.

Traditional specialization often divided different forms of hardship, rather than work and leisure. A wife caring for several young children while producing meals and clothing was working. A husband spending long days in a mine was also working. Comparing them through a single number can obscure more than it reveals.

The twentieth century gives us better numbers

The situation becomes clearer once time diaries appear. Economist Valerie Ramey reconstructed American home-production time from early twentieth-century diaries and connected those estimates to modern surveys. Her results challenge several common assumptions.

Prime-age women’s home-production time fell by about six hours per week between 1900 and 1965, then by another twelve hours between 1965 and 2005. Prime-age men’s home-production time increased by roughly thirteen hours per week between 1900 and 2005.

Perhaps most surprisingly, when children and older adults are included, per-capita home-production time did not collapse during the twentieth century. It increased slightly. Appliances reduced drudgery and changed tasks, but households also raised standards and shifted time into childcare, shopping, management, and other activities. That is a very different story from: “The washing machine eliminated women’s work.” It changed work.

Paid work moved in the opposite direction

At the same time, women moved dramatically into paid employment. In the United States, married women’s labour-force participation rose from about 5.6 percent in 1900 to 23 percent in 1950 and 31.7 percent in 1960, continuing upward thereafter. Modern couples consequently distribute both paid and unpaid work much more evenly than their early twentieth-century counterparts.

But not perfectly evenly. In the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2024 time-use data, women averaged about 2.34 hours of household activities per day compared with 1.67 hours for men across the civilian population age 15 and over. Among employed people, men spent somewhat more time in paid work on working days. Full-time employed men averaged about 8.2 hours compared with 7.9 hours for full-time employed women.

The modern difference is therefore often less about whether both sexes work than about the composition of that work. Men still average somewhat more paid labour. Women still average somewhat more unpaid household and care labour.

Total work is the better question

This suggests a better way to think about historical relationships. Instead of asking: Who had a job? ask: What work did the household need, and who performed it?

A traditional household might require sixty hours of external farm or wage labour from the husband and many additional hours of food production, childcare, textile work, cleaning, and household management from the wife. A modern household might contain two forty-hour earners who divide ten or twenty additional hours of domestic work between them and purchase several services from markets. The work bundle changes. The allocation changes. The household still has to solve the problem.

Why this matters to relationship models

The traditional model made sense partly because household labour was large enough to justify specialization. There was simply too much work for every adult to perform every task equally. Modern households purchase and mechanize far more of their needs. That makes symmetry more practical. But modern dual-income families also create a new scarcity: Time.

Two adults may now spend most of their prime daytime hours working for organizations outside the family. Domestic work must happen around those jobs. Childcare must be purchased, shared, or provided by relatives. Meals become quicker. Home maintenance is outsourced. The household produces less directly but coordinates more external services.

So the historical transition is not from work to leisure. It is closer to: Household production → market production and purchased services. That is why comparing only employment hours gives us such a distorted picture of traditional family life.

Men worked. Women worked. Children often worked. They simply did different combinations of work inside a household economy that no longer exists in the same form.

Research & references

• Valerie Ramey, “Time Spent in Home Production in the Twentieth-Century United States.”
• Jane Whittle et al., The Experience of Work in Early Modern England.
• U.S. Census Bureau, 1900 enumerator instructions and historical labour-force statistics.
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey, 2024.
• Statistics Canada, Time Use Survey, 2022.