Imbalance: Woman spend 18 per cent more of their time on activities including housework and childcare in comparison to men (file picture)
Women around the world are putting in more hours of a work a week than men.
But males are being compensated more for their labour because they spend longer in the workplace, a survey has revealed.
If the time spent in in the office is added to how long is spent doing household chores, females do around four hours more hard graft than their male counterparts over seven days.
The biggest difference was in Italy, where women worked for 11 hours longer than men inside and outside the home.
Across 16 developing countries, women, on average, spend 18 per cent more time on activities like cooking and childcare.
But, even though the gender gap in the workplace is shortening, men still spend 30 per cent longer doing paid work.
Women do 24.5 hours of paid work per week on average and 31.5 hours of other activities, including cleaning and washing up, while men work for 33.7 hours in a paid job and do 21 hours of unpaid work (50 per cent less than women)
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development surveyed 28 countries in the OECD, and found that in 22 of them, women end up working longer hours than men in a given week.
In the United States, men and women work close to an equal number of hours, but females take on significantly more of the household burden.
Even though the gap is small an American women is compensated for fewer than half her hours. while a man, on the other hand, is paid for 65 per cent of his work.
In the UK, women work two hours more than men a week on average, the same as in China and Mexico, while in New Zealand, the males shared more of the burden, working for two hours longer during the week.
In Italy, the country which has the largest imbalance, women work an average of 22 hours in a paid job, as well as doing 35 hours of housework each week.
However, there were six countries that reversed the trend where men made up for the housework gap by working longer hours at a paid job.
These were Japan, New Zealand, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden.
Catching up: Men are sharing more of the household chores, but are more likely to multitask by watching sport while looking after the children
In all the countries surveyed, women did the majority of the housework, which proves to be an obstacle when getting into the workplace or building a career.
The OECD also noted that men tend to have slightly more positive feelings about housework than women, because they prefer to multitask.
An example of this would be a father who looks after his children while reading a newspaper or watching sport on television.
Women, on the other hand, combine activities more frequently, but are more likely to mixing childcare with a task like cooking or cleaning.
While most countries are still far from having an equality between the sexes, the trend is heading towards equality.
The OECD also notes more couples are outsourcing housework by eating out or buying prepared foods, using childcare services or hiring help for cleaning.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2487879/Its-official-Women-work-harder-men-especially-Italy-11-hours-week-male-counterparts.html#ixzz2jniFfwYy
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