In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Uhhhh….

A new study, apparently, has found that working long hours is worse for women than for men because women who work long hours tend to eat more unhealthy food and consume more caffeine than men who work long hours.

Now, nowhere do I see a mention of the home lives of these women. Because this jumped out at me:

“Women who work long hours eat more high-fat and high-sugar snacks, exercise less, drink more caffeine and, if smokers, smoke more than their male colleagues,” said Dr. Daryl O’Connor, a researcher at Britain’s Leeds University.

For men, working longer hours has no negative impact on exercise, caffeine intake or smoking,” O’Connor said in a statement released by the Economic and Social Research Council, which funded his study.

Emphasis mine.

Now, which of these things — drinking coffee, smoking or exercise — requires free time? And given that many, many working women also take on the bulk of childcare and housework responsibilities, it’s not really that difficult to see that a woman who works longer hours AND has to take care of the kids and the house when she gets home would be more stressed and wouldn’t be able to get in the nice stress-relieving workout that maybe her husband gets to do. So she turns to stress eating, coffee and smoking.

I haven’t seen the actual study, but the writeup by Reuters certainly sends a pernicious little message that working outside the home is bad for women.


11 thoughts on Uhhhh….

  1. Presumably men who work long hours are more likely to have a sit-down meal waiting for them when they get home, too, which could explain why women are more likely to combine long work hours with crappy eating habits.

  2. …I wonder if it has anything to do with stress dieting. A woman might be more likely to skip meals because she believes she isn’t exercising enough. That usually translates into less of things like calcium and fiber and more crappy stress eating when you break down and nosh a candy bar.

  3. My first comment after lurking for a while, so Hello!

    My co-worker and I are both avid cyclists. Here’s the phone call I make to my husband when I am going for a ride after work:

    “Hi, going for a ride, I left dinner in the crock pot, don’t forget the kids have soccer at 6:00, I’ll be back by 8:00 to tuck them in and I’ll finish up cleaning out the hall closet then.”

    Co-worker’s call home “Hi. Going for a ride. See you later.”

    Hmm, it’s a complete mystery to me why more women don’t enjoy regular exercise…

    I know, he should do more, I should do less, but there it is.

  4. Presumably men who work long hours are more likely to have a sit-down meal waiting for them when they get home, too, which could explain why women are more likely to combine long work hours with crappy eating habits.

    That’s a good observation. And again it probably goes back to one of those social “norm” expectations- that a man comes home from working long hours and doesn’t have to lift a finger around the house, while a woman who works long hours as zuzu mentions would have to take on the “second shift.” But hey, that’s what the uppity little girl gets for working outside of the house and doing long hours worth of it, right?! (sarcasm)

    I haven’t seen the actual study, but the writeup by Reuters certainly sends a pernicious little message that working outside the home is bad for women.

    And how many of these published “studies,” laden with the subtle anti-women-working-outside-of-the-home innuendo do we get per week? Anybody keeping tally? Aren’t fads supposed to die out?

  5. I repeat: No More Sex (with us) for Men until they cut this shit OUT !! This “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” SHIT!!!”

    As a man, I’d much rather have free time to exercise and all that than sex. So the whole withholding thing probably won’t work. You’ll actually have to, you know, talk about it.

  6. Word, Ali. Also, not all of us have a partner. And when children are very young, they don’t have the energy to stay awake or be shuttled back-and-forth from the gym. I got a “baby jogger” stroller, but after the weather got too chilly I didn’t use it—I couldn’t see putting my underweight daughter at risk for pneumonia (kids get pretty cold just sitting and/or sleeping in those things if it’s brisk outside). So there’s that too. I put exercise on the back burner until my work schedule returned to normal.

    Didn’t affect my smoking though; I still don’t smoke. Which brings up another thing—how were the questions worded? I mean, if someone didn’t exercise, couldn’t it be said that long working hours didn’t affect their exercise routine?

  7. I have actually had this conversation with my male (married) boss. He’s actually a pretty decent guy (as bosses go), but until we discussed it, it never even crossed his mind that when I work the same workaholic hours he does — there’s no one at home to feed me or make sure I have clean clothes or grocery shop…or…

    Yeah, his wife works with us, too. She ususally goes home on time…which of course just means that she’s doing the “second shift” thing at home while he’s still at the office.

  8. The free time thing is an important point. I wonder if women also eat less healthy foods because women tend to work in lower-paid occupations, and unhealthy food is cheaper. An attorney or businessman can order his lunch from a local restaurant and get a sandwich or a green salad, and can afford to do that every day. A woman working as a nurse’s aid might be more likely to just buy a candy bar from the vending machines.

  9. I can’t seem to download any of the study papers, but what’s interesting is that this snippet about long hours and unhealthy behavior is from a study on how people respond to stress. And apparently all the little stressors are triggers.

    So, you can also ask, who is more likely to decide to work long hours, versus having that decision handed down from above?

  10. In case anyone wants to actually read the thing, you can download the pdf here:

    http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/ViewAwardPage.aspx?AwardId=2492

    Get the “end of reward report”

    Apparently, the main thrust was about eating and stress (exercise was barely mentioned).

    And it found that, when stressed, women snack more heavily and choose fatty foods more often than when not. And yes, it also found that men don’t.

    To me, it definitely did not send any message about women not working. It may send a message that when women work long hours or suffer stress, they need to be more careful than men about their diets. This may be cultural, or it may be genetic, but there it is.

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