The bar chart illustrates the average amount of leisure time enjoyed by men and women in various employment categories during a typical week in the period 1998-99.
Overall, a clear inverse relationship exists between formal employment hours and leisure time. It is also evident that men consistently accessed more hours of recreation than their female counterparts across all comparable categories, with the unemployed and retired groups enjoying the highest levels of free time.
In terms of those with the most leisure, unemployed and retired men topped the scale at approximately 85 and 83 hours per week, respectively. Women in these same categories followed closely, though they averaged slightly less at roughly 78 hours each. Interestingly, housewives – a category with no male equivalent in the data – experienced significantly less leisure than the retired or unemployed, totaling approximately 50 hours weekly.
Conversely, full-time employment resulted in the lowest leisure availability. Full-time employed men received about 45 hours of free time, while women in full-time roles had the least of all groups at just under 40 hours. This gender gap persisted in part-time work; while there was no data provided for part-time men, women in this sector enjoyed 40 hours of leisure, which notably surpassed the leisure time of their full-time female counterparts but remained lower than all male categories shown.