Women spend twice as much time as men, on average, on childcare and household work. All groups experience a free-time gender gap, with women having 13% less free time than men, on average. Mothers spend 2.3X as much time as fathers on the essential and unpaid work of taking care of home and family Young women (18-24) experience one of the largest free-time gender gaps, having 20% less free time than men their age Working women spend 2X as many hours per week as working men on childcare and household work combined Mothers who work part-time spend 3.8X as much time on childcare and household work as fathers who work part-time Married women without children spend 2.3X as much time as their male counterparts on household work Among Latinos, mothers spend more than 3.6X as much time as fathers taking care of children and doing household work

The unequal division of unpaid work in the home, such as cooking, cleaning, and shopping for food and clothing, is a powerful testament to the tenacity of old gender norms. Women do significantly more of this work than men do, even when there are no children living in the home. This holds true for women regardless of their marital status, their employment status, or their level of education.

Among all adults without children, women do twice as much household work as men, dedicating 12.3 hours per week to these tasks, on average, compared to 6 hours for men. Similarly, among all single people without children, women do nearly twice as much household work as men, spending 10.6 hours per week on household tasks compared to 5.7 hours for men.

getting married seems to exacerbate the burden of household work on women. Married women do substantially more household work than their single women peers, while married men spend just a few minutes a day more than their single peers. Married women without children do 2.3 times as much household work as their male counterparts (14.3 hours per week versus 6.2 hours).

Working women spend significantly more time than working men on unpaid work in the home. This is the case whether they work full-time or part-time. It is the case whether they have children or not. Take household work like cooking, laundry, and the like. Women who work full-time do 1.8 times as much as men who work full-time; they spend 9.7 hours per week on it compared to 5.4 hours for men. Women who work part-time do 2.5 times as much household work as men who work part-time.

Across every group studied, men spend more time than women socializing, watching sports or playing video games, or doing similar activities to relax or have fun. Women overall have 13% less free time than men, on average. The gap balloons among some groups, with women having up to one-quarter less free time than men.

Women overall have 13% less free time than men, on average. The gap balloons among some groups, with women having up to nearly one-quarter less free time than men.

there is a wide gulf between our ideals and our realities, as we have seen in this report on how Americans divide the work of taking care of home and family. One reason for the persistence of these gender disparities is that the U.S. has failed to modernize its public policies to fit 21st century economic realities. Even though 78% of American women are in the labor force, the nation’s social infrastructure is still largely premised on the assumption that mothers will be at home with children.

Every high-income nation in the world provides for paid leave for new parents—except the United States. Most provide ample financial and institutional support for childcare and preschool. Our peers devote a substantial share of public spending to family benefits, but the U.S. invests only minimally in supporting families. For instance, family benefits account for 2.4% of GDP in Germany compared to 0.6% in the United States.

Even when young children enter school, typical American school hours are grossly misaligned with the workday, forcing families to either spend money on after school care or reduce their work hours.

Public policy alone will not entirely eliminate these deeply rooted gender disparities. Cultural change is needed too. But smart policy can nudge along positive behavioral change that ultimately advances equity and equality. For example, several countries include mechanisms in their family policy to encourage fathers to take paid parent leave. Many Nordic nations have a ‘use it or lose it’ provision for fathers. Other countries, like Canada, provide extra paid weeks of leave to families if both parents use the time.

The unequal division of care work, particularly, affects women’s opportunity and well-being in ways that cannot be measured solely in dollars and cents.

One way Americans deal with the housing affordability crisis is to move to distant suburbs and exurbs, where housing is cheaper than it is in central cities and job hubs. The tradeoff, however, is typically a long commute to and from work. But for women who are caring for children or elderly relatives, long commutes are often not feasible. Children and elderly parents get sick and need to get to doctors in the middle of a workday. School hours begin too late and end too early to accommodate a commute to a 9-to-5 job.

when schools close due to climate-driven events, mothers might have to take unpaid time off of work or pay for childcare. As Americans experience more dangerous heat waves, wildfires, and floods driven by climate change, the caregiving demands on women can increase, as they are more likely to be the ones responsible for helping children and elderly adults stay out of harm’s way.

Social media is the lens for a lot of the show’s biggest bits and even plotlines. It is, just as in life, omnipresent, and so, even as the show spotlights the inherent ridiculousness of the extremely online, it also understands the way social media is a deranging accelerant of everyday problems, and thus a medium of everyday life.

These are all just a bunch of funny jokes about people who are too online, celebrities whose shallow fame exists only by way of the apps, and a contemporary American culture hypnotized by the blue light of screens.

In her book The Drama of Celebrity, the scholar Sharon Marcus argues that celebrity, as we know it, is a cultural phenomenon with three distinct authors. There’s the celebrity, who expresses themself through whatever art or product they make; there are the journalists who write about and photograph and criticize and otherwise construct the celebrity’s public image; and then there’s the public, who contribute devotion and imagination, and money, and love and hate.

There was a time when Marilyn Monroe emerged as an illusion, a trick of the light produced between herself, her studio’s massive press apparatus, and an adoring and vampiric public. Today, anyone can be an illusion like this, if at smaller scale.

The show by no means wants to redeem the industry, but, this season especially, it’s become invested in exposing the lazy nihilism that can come along with seeing the worst in people. If you run into a craven, soulless industry hack in the morning, you ran into a craven, soulless industry hack; if you run into them all day, you are the craven, soulless industry hack.

The Other Two is about identity. It’s a flimsy, fungible thing, and it’s a trap. It’s a point of pride and a point of embarrassment. There’s the real you that we all struggle to find and to express truthfully; there’s the version of yourself that you perform for the public; there’s the version of you that others create in and against their own image.

Much of the mockery towards Che came from the queer community, who were pretty easily able to see the difference between an authentic representation of a queer character, and a kind of walking diversity checkbox designed to bring a style of woke chaos to a story.

AJLT has clearly been engaged in the criticism of SATC - the three main characters all get a black friend who is given almost equal time and importance. And Che not only answers criticism of lack of representation of sexuality on SATC, but cuts off future criticism of AJLT.

In one scene, Che is watching a focus group give feedback on the pilot of their sitcom. A young, clearly queer member speaks up about how much they hate the “character” of Che in the sitcom. They clearly represent the fan and critical response to Che Diax in AJLT season 1, and it’s fascinating to see what the show thinks these kinds of people are - ie a minorly updated blue haired woke stereotype.

In the show, this brings Che to tears, and through this scene, our criticism of Che is emotionally rebuked. We can see that the tears of Che Diaz are the tears of the writers, appalled at our meanness.

fans are always going to be motivated by different things to the writer. A fan, especially ones with the kind of parasocial relationship to shows and characters that are big these days, are always going to want the best for the character, to see their favourites thrive and find love and get the magic sword, etc. A writer doesn’t and shouldn’t care about any of that - a writer should only be writing the best story, creating the most fulfilling narrative arc. Sometimes, when it comes to crafting a narrative, pain and suffering is important for the character, goals need to be unreached, swords remain in the stone.

Introduced as Carrie’s “modern” podcast partner, and then later Miranda’s queer sexual awakening, Che was a non-binary standup comedian who unfortunately had a lot of functions to fulfil in the story. They were a kind of stand-in to represent exactly everything that had changed in sex and dating and gender and sexuality in the years since the original Sex and The City had gracefully left our screens.

They were a truly baffling character, a kind of frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from hazy ideas of gender and queer theory, mashed into one character to be a comedic foil for the older (and somewhat startlingly conservative at times) original characters - but also as a way to try and seriously engage with ideas of representation and diversity. You never knew if you were meant to laugh at Che, or at the other character’s moments of less-than-wokeness around Che - or take them seriously.

And Just Like That - a show that can only be described as watching Sex and the City through the aged filter on TikTok while suffering a potentially fatal fever - is the greatest show on television. By that I mean it’s so bad. God I love it. It’s just inexplicably confusing, a show defined by big swings that almost never hit, but that doesn’t matter, there’s a kind of deranged joy in that. It’s almost perfect. But it’s also so weird.There seems to be a happy chaos to the show, a willingness to just put forward insane new developments for these beloved characters, and just run with it.

the reason that Che Diaz felt so out of place, a sore thumb, is  because their entire arc in the latest season is responding to fan and critical discourse.

I think there are a million things to be discouraged about in the world, but I do think that the progress being made on "what it means to be a man" is moving in the right direction. It's clear men can be terrible, and the last decade in particular has had several movements root out some of the worst offenders, but I truly think all of us no matter our gender are more alike than we've historically thought, and the more we recognize that the better off we'll be.

Extrapolating this further, I think women care much more about cultivating beauty and decreasing suffering (emotion-led), while men are primarily motivated by problem-solving and power (conquest-led)

I know I’m not alone. In fact, I think most women are like this. From my observer seat, women seem to generally be much more comfortable living life through anyone else’s lens but their own. Which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: seeing in third person unlocks a woman’s ability to appease, making for an excellent survival strategy.

I call this living life in third person. It’s mostly hardwiring that has the side effect of self-erasure. Modern feminist rhetoric would lead you to believe that this was programmed into us via the patriarchy and while I don’t doubt that’s one way this dynamic is amplified, I’m unconvinced that’s the root source of it. Women are simply much more inclined to strategies that guarantee safety than men.

Everyone has experienced some vague sense of “not right”ness that usually boils down to emotional needs not getting met: connection, acceptance, feeling seen, to name a few. If you’re anything like me, after a couple of times getting burned you learned to bury the desires instead of facing the pain of trying and failing to get them satiated.

I learned at a young age that I couldn’t depend on people to be there for me consistently, so, for efficiency purposes, it only made sense to turn off all parts of me that desired to depend on anyone but myself. I became a micromanager of my wants to mitigate the shame of having them. Granted this didn’t feel particularly fulfilling — but at least assuming such an active role made me feel like I had a choice in the matter.

I adopted a similar mindset when interrogating my feelings — constantly asking myself questions like: is this thought defensible? Are you sure? These are good questions to ask yourself in any scenario except the one where they’re not thoughts and instead feelings. Questioning and then discounting feelings prematurely tends to have the opposite effect of its hyper-rational intention — leaving a person in a loop of confusion, uncertainty, and unmet needs.

Living life in third person means the possibility space of things I allow myself to say and feel are constrained to the aesthetics of how I want to be perceived. At risk here is ownership of the little thing I call my life.

The claim that simpler gender recognition will lead to unsafe changing rooms and toilets is further undermined by a strange and ignominious chapter in North Carolina’s history where, in 2016, these exact concerns led to the introduction of a law demanding people only use toilets which correspond to the gender stated on their birth certificate. The new law not only caused a rise in transphobia, it also opened up the possibility of increased harassment of women in public restrooms who weren’t transgender but who didn’t dress or present in a ‘feminine’ way. It also meant that transgender men were being forced to use women’s toilets. In the end, a federal judge got rid of the dangerous and unworkable legislation in 2019.

“…often cite fear of safety and privacy violations in public restrooms if such laws are passed…No empirical evidence has been gathered to test such laws’ effects…This study finds that the passage of such laws is not related to the number or frequency of criminal incidents in these spaces.

Men who prey on vulnerable women are a worldwide problem, but this has nothing whatever to do with trans people. On the contrary, trans people are generally far more worried about accessing toilets and changing rooms than cisgender women, because they fear being verbally abused or attacked by people who don’t think they should be there.

It would be useful to know of the evidence you have that trans rights are affecting education and/or safeguarding. Trans rights do not affect either, just as the right to equal marriage did not affect the rights of cisgender heterosexual people to marry

We do not consider it a crime for women to express concern. We do however consider it abusive and damaging when people conflate trans women with male sexual predators, impute sexual criminality to trans identities, suggest that support of a trans child is parental homophobia and misogyny, and share uncorroborated and inaccurate information which severely damages the lives of trans and non-binary people.

By creating a character who can’t be written off as another predictably problematic man, “Tár” draws our attention to how Lydia learned to become one. And, by following Lydia closely, the film relieves the audience of a neurotic cultural obsession with the artistic legacies of real-life powerful figures, focussing instead on their tools. In lieu of asking “Can you separate the art from the artist?” or “But what will happen to these poor, bad men?,” “Tár” asks, “What does power look like, feel like, not only within an institution but within an individual psyche?”

At nineteen, I wrote in a private journal that “the knowledge that anything I feel has already been expressed in a work of art” was my version of feeling watched over by a higher power.

I do not mean to suggest that art works can be divorced from social context, only that our reactions to them are not, in themselves, public statements, acts of harm, or good deeds.

Everyone can - and often does - have confident opinions about those questions. But you can't really answer them in any objective way unless we can agree on a definition of the word.There are basically two categories of definitions:The interpersonal definitions. Something like "Prejudice or antagonism directed against another person based on their membership in a racial group."The sociological definitions. Something like "A highly organized system of 'race'-based group privilege that operates at every level of society and is held together by a sophisticated ideology of color/'race' supremacy."

“Eliminated the idea of personal racism” is kinda an overstatement isn’t it? Like yeah, it exists, but interpersonal racism against white people just doesn’t do anything, or at least nothing worse than any other kind of insult like calling them an asshole. It maybe hurts white feelings a little and that’s it, but most white people don’t even seem offended by terms like “Mayo monkey” or “cracker” and I would guess it’s because those terms aren’t representative of white people being systemically oppressed for being white, since that’s never been a thing. There’s an important distinction in that things like N word or the propaganda trying to paint black and brown people as being criminals is literally tied to slavery

Basically, these kinds of disagreements boil down to there being two ways to define racism: a colloquial definition, where racism is just treating someone differently due to their race, and a more academic definition drawn from the social sciences and philosophy where racism is, to use the standard simplification "prejudice plus power."

You're using the first definition, on which you are correct that it appears to be possible to be racist against white people; and your sister is using the second, on which she is correct that it would seem impossible to be racist to white people, at least in the context of a society where whites are and have historically been in a position of power over other racial groups.

Every aspect of interacting with the various institutions that monitored and managed my kids—ACS, the foster care agency, Medicaid clinics—produced new data streams. Diagnoses, whether an appointment was rescheduled, notes on the kids’ appearance and behavior, and my perceived compliance with the clinician’s directives were gathered and circulated through a series of state and municipal data warehouses. And this data was being used as input by machine learning models automating service allocation or claiming to predict the likelihood of child abuse.

The dominant narrative about child welfare is that it is a benevolent system that cares for the most vulnerable. The way data is correlated and named reflects this assumption. But this process of meaning making is highly subjective and contingent. Similar to the term “artificial intelligence,” the altruistic veneer of “child welfare system” is highly effective marketing rather than a description of a concrete set of functions with a mission gone awry.

Child welfare is actually family policing. What AFST presents as the objective determinations of a de-biased system operating above the lowly prejudices of human caseworkers are just technical translations of long-standing convictions about Black pathology. Further, the process of data extraction and analysis produce truths that justify the broader child welfare apparatus of which it is a part.

As the scholar Dorothy Roberts explains in her 2022 book Torn Apart, an astonishing 53 percent of all Black families in the United States have been investigated by family policing agencies.

The kids were contractually the property of New York State and I was just an instrument through which they could supervise their property. In fact, foster parents are the only category of parents legally obligated to open the door to a police officer or a child protective services agent without a warrant. When a foster parent “opens their home” to go through the set of legal processes to become certified to take a foster child, their entire household is subject to policing and surveillance.

Not a single one was surprised about the false allegations. What they were uniformly shocked about was that the kids hadn’t been snatched up. While what happened to us might seem shocking to middle-class readers, for family policing it is the weather. (Black theorist Christina Sharpe describes antiblackness as climate.)