The article reviewed in this paper is called “How Nonemployed Americans Spend Their Weekdays: Men vs. Women.” It was posted on the New York Times’ Upshot section by Josh Katz. The upshot is the new venture started by the New York Times. The upshot is focused on collecting data-driven materials for various surveys and researches of economic, political, and social character.
The article by Katz presents a series of diagrams and charts showing the differences between the behavioral patterns of the unemployed American males and females. The author demonstrates the descriptions of the typical daily activities of men and women that do not have jobs to compare and contrast between them.
The first chart shows the correlation between normal everyday behaviors and practices for unemployed men and women. The list of weekday activities includes traveling, caring for others, education, housework, sleep, socializing, and watching TV (Katz par. 1).
The picture makes it clear that women spend most of their time doing housework, while men prefer to relax in front of a TV. Another activity taking a significant amount of time of unemployed people of both sexes is sleeping; people without jobs clearly sleep more than their working peers.
Looking for a new job is another standard daily activity for unemployed men and women. This activity is approached individually by each participator of the survey. For example, some people prefer to arrange their job search as one lengthy block, while others divide this process into several sections practiced at different periods of time.
Interestingly enough, the job search is the primary daily activity only for only a few unemployed people. One out of six people spends most of the time searching for a job, while the rest enjoy television and movies (Katz par. 7).
The survey also demonstrated that almost one-fifth of all unemployed women spend their days taking care of others. The majority of the female participators of the research had children. The women that did not have children spent their time caring about their parents or other people. Out of all participants, thirty-two women reported caring about others as a significant part of their daily life; the number of men reporting the same was twelve (Katz par. 12).
While such activities as leisure, caring for others, housework and sleep dominate among all of the mentioned daily occupations, education is one that stands out among the less significant practices. One hundred and forty-seven men and the same number of women took part in the survey, and only eleven of them all said that self-education was an important daily practice for them.
Seven men and four women reported at five or more hours of self-education per day. Another minor, yet distinct daily activity of the unemployed men and women was socialization. The survey showed that the amount of socialization of unemployed people exceeds one of their working peers by one and a half times.
In general, the majority of unemployed men seems to start their day with the job search, after which they go back to sleep, whereas women prefer to sleep longer, and then get down to housework together with caring for others, and practice job search in shorter sections during the rest of the day. Travelling occupies a noticeable amount of time in the evening for people of both sexes, and it seems like this includes recreational activities such as going out with friends.
Works Cited
Katz, J. How Nonemployed Americans Spend Their Weekdays: Men vs. Women. 2015. Web.