Indian men last on household chores

Those were some of the findings by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which released a study Thursday on gender disparities in 29 countries. Indian women, the Paris-based group found, spend about six hours a day on unpaid household work such as cleaning, cooking, shopping and child care. Their male counterparts spend less than an hour, or 53 minutes, a day on those activities, only behind Korean men, who spend 45 minutes a day helping around the house.

So what do Indian men do for most of their day? Answer: Eat, sleep, watch television and listen to the radio. That’s right: The average Indian man spends more than 11 hours a day on what OECD describes as personal care — mostly sleeping, eating and drinking. That’s half-hour more than the average time Indian women would spend on those activities, an hour more than what an average American man would spend, and two hours more than the average Englishman. In fact, it’s the most anyone spends on personal care world-over.

They do, however, give over comparatively less time than their American and English counterparts to leisure activities such as playing sports, watching television, or visiting friends. An Indian man spends an average nine minutes a day on playing sports, but he watches television for an hour. In the U.S. and the U.K., in comparison, men dedicate about half-hour each day to sports, and about two-and-a-half hours to watching television.

A startling statistic: Indian women spend less than an hour a day watching television, the lowest when compared with women world-over. Given the slew of Hindi dramas that have sprung up on Indian channels in recent years, and the fact that a vast majority of Indian women are homemakers – only one-third of India’s total paid labor force accounts for women – that may seem like a gross underestimation. And in all likelihood, it is.

OECD’s report compares countries based on the latest government data available for these indicators. In India’s case, the most recent information is from 1999, when only a handful of programs played on television. Moreover, television was, at the time, a privilege reserved for the elite and upper-middle class. Now, it is ubiquitous and not unusual to see television sets in the smallest and most makeshift of homes in India’s slums.

One could also argue, similarly, that thanks to urbanization and mechanization, the hours women put into housework have rapidly reduced over the last decade. It remains, unclear, however, whether the same can be said about men’s contribution to household work. Recent studies show that despite the push for women empowerment and gender equity, Indian men remain wary to lend a helping hand at home.

In 2011, for instance, the International Center for Research on Women, a U.S.-based nonprofit surveyed men across six developing countries, and found that in India, men said they pitched in with less than a quarter of the total housework. In the other five countries – Brazil, Chile, Croatia, Mexico and Rwanda – men said they divided household chores equally.

India and Portugal are the only countries on OECD’s list to have government statistics only dating to the 1990s. Almost all others have data over the past decade; the U.S., for instance, has statistics from 2010, while the U.K. from 2005.