How to write a New York Times article to make it seem like women work harder than men

A couple weeks ago, the New York Times came out with this article about the distribution of labor within American marriages, which reached the top of their "most-emailed" list. And guess what? According to the author of the piece, Lisa Belkin, things aren't equal.

No, things are awful. And people are irrational. (As one of the experts quoted in the article explains, “When you look at this rationally, it is very difficult to understand why things are the way they are.”)

You see, men have things very good, and women have things very bad. Why? Because wives do a lot more housework than their husbands. (She claims that this only counts unpleasant work like cooking, not fun stuff like reading to your kids.)

Hmm. But ... wait a minute. Is that all that matters? Think about it. What's missing?

Last year, an article in Slate by Joel Waldfogel summarized the findings of a new international study:

Throughout the world, men spend more time on market work, while women spend more time on homework. In the United States and other rich countries, men average 5.2 hours of market work a day and 2.7 hours of homework each day, while women average 3.4 hours of market work and 4.5 hours of homework per day. Adding these up, men work an average of 7.9 hours per day, while women work an average of—drum roll, please—7.9 hours per day.

OK, so one article says things are horribly unequal, and the other says things are exactly equal, down to the fraction of an hour.

So who's right? Well, the Slate article looked at housework and employment (which the article clumsily calls "homework" and "market work"). The New York Times article looks only at housework, and ignores employment.

That certainly looks to me like the New York Times will omit whatever relevant information it has to from a story, as long as this will lead to a conclusion that men are lazy and uncaring, while women are overworked and sympathetic.

But I don't want people to go away from this thinking, "So he agrees with the article that says men and women do equal amounts of work, and he disagrees with the article that says women have it rough." Nope. I don't necessarily believe that.

For one thing, the Slate article is, as I said, about ... men and women. Did you notice what's missing? We don't know their marital status! All the data cited in the article seem to lump single men and women together with married couples. So you can't leap to conclusions about whether marriages are equitable. The article just isn't about that.

But of course, just because Slate left something out is no excuse for the Times to leave something else out. And in fact, the New York Times' omission is much worse.

See, the Slate article wasn't claiming to say anything important about marriages in particular (just men and women of any marital status). Incomplete? Sure. Actively misleading? Not really.

Belkin, on the other hand, is trying her hardest to get you to think, "Well, gee, marriage is incredibly unfair to women!"

Admittedly, Belkin didn't completely ignore this point. No, it's worse than that! She brings up the point to make it look like she's addressed it, but without providing enough information to really judge whether marriages are inequitable:

[Francine Deutsch, one of the researchers,] was struck by how often the wife’s job was seen by both spouses as being more flexible than the husband’s. By way of example she describes two actual couples, one in which he is a college professor and she is a physician and one in which she is a college professor and he is a physician. In either case, Deutsch says “both the husband and wife claimed the man’s job was less flexible.”

Well, the "college professor" vs. "physician" examples may be a cute way to illustrate that narrow psychological point. But what about the much more important question:

How much do men and women actually work in the workplace? And if men work more, is it enough to cancel out the housework disparity? We never find out; we're only told the figures for work done at home.

To be fair, the article does break the housework statistics down into broad categories of how much the husband and wife work at the workplace: we find out that the housework disparity exists even when both spouses have "full-time paying jobs," and we're told that this "makes no sense at all."

But that's just not good enough. Some full-time jobs have much longer hours than others, and it wouldn't be surprising if men tended to work the longer full-time jobs. Why are we told the specific number of hours of housework, but not the specific number of hours worked at the workplace? Without that information, it's impossible to know how big a disparity (if any) there is.

[UPDATE: I could have been a little more precise in making that point. She does give a statistic that looks on its face like it's telling you exactly how many hours men and women work at the workplace, but you can't usefully compare it with any of her other statistics because it's from a different study. And it's buried about as deep into the article as possible. See this update for a long, boring explanation.]

Keep in mind, this is a long, long article with a seemingly endless parade of characters, quips, and anecdotes. There was enough space for a diaphanous point like this: "Messages, loud and soft, direct and oblique, reinforce contextual choice." But they didn't have enough space for the crucial data about how much work husbands and wives do in the workplace.

And on top of all that, Belkin insists on looking just at quantity, not quality, of housework. If the wife spends two hours cooking and cleaning, while the husband spends an hour and a half on car repairs and carpentry, who would you rather be? It's far from obvious.

Once you start looking at the complex qualitative distinctions, the quantitative distinctions stop seeming like the only thing that matters. But again, the Times seems determined to leave out whatever information it has to so that it looks like women are the ones getting the raw deal.

And to combine the two points: what about the qualitative features of men's vs. women's employment? There are some pretty unpleasant jobs that are disproportionately likely to be done by men -- not because of discrimination but because men are just more willing to do certain jobs. Firefighter and trash collector spring to mind. There's no evidence that Belkin is even thinking about that, let alone looking at the relevant data.

Maybe the distribution of work in marriages is unfair to women ... or maybe it's unfair to men. Or maybe everything evens out in the end. I don't know the truth. But at least I know that I don't know.

(Photo of woman drying clothes by SF Buckaroo. Photo of father and daughter by Jamie Goodridge.)

UPDATE: Thanks so much to Instapundit and my mom for linking to this post.