UN Report: women spend 2-4x the number of hours on family and domestic responsibilities as men

[AnnieLobeseder]

I lifted this from the weekly roundup I get from Science magazine.

The snippet is more focussed on the paper linked at the bottom, which is about the correlation between wealth and happiness, and meaningfulness of time spent with children. But I'm interested in the opening sentence about the UN report (which I must go hunting for) about women spending so much more time on domestic responsibilities than men. This is probably skewed by SAHMs who obviously spend more time on domestic responsibilities, so I would need to examine the data more closely. Then again, if there were more SAHDs, there wouldn't be that skewing of the data.

I'm having trouble working out what they mean about the relationship between money (and it doesn't specify women) and finding meaning in caring for children and work. And I'm supposed to be quite clever . Do they mean that the more money people have, the less 'meaningfulness' they get out of time spent with their children? Does that mean we should all give up work, stay home and be poor and happy?

A Wealth of Meaning
Gilbert Chin
The United Nations recently reported that women spend anywhere from twice to four times the number of hours on family and domestic responsibilities as men, which has invigorated a discussion about the tradeoffs between career and family that women often face. Kushlev et al. examined the link between wealth?in the form of education and income?and subjective measures of the meaningfulness of life and happiness of residents of British Columbia. An inverse relation was observed between socioeconomic status and the meaningfulness of life for parents when taking care of their children, whereas during the rest of the day, there was no such correlation. In a follow-up field experiment, the concept of wealth was casually introduced while asking attendees at a children's festival about their happiness and sense of meaning. Once again, there was no link between wealth and happiness, but a negative relation between thoughts of wealth and a sense of meaningfulness. Thus, paradoxically, affluence may compromise one of the subjective benefits of parenting?a sense of meaning in life.
J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 48, 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.06.001 (2012)

I think it means, that people of a higher socio-economic standing get more out of their jobs, than those of a lower socio-economic standing - low paid unskilled jobs are usually less fun and challenging than skilled jobs which are usually paid more.

I don't think it says "we should all give up work and be happy", but that those who go for a better earning more need the job for their happiness, too and can't get it out of raising their offspring alone.

But that's only my interpretation.