UK males now work 3.3 hours fewer per week 

Workplace for Nationwide Statistics (ONS) information launched in the present day reveals that UK males are spending fewer hours at work, creating area within the workforce for his or her feminine colleagues, who’ve elevated their common working hours.

In response to the figures, between 1998 and 2022, common working hours for males have fallen by 3.3 hours per week. Ladies, in the meantime, now work an additional 1.4 hours per week, with full-time staff seeing the largest uplift in timesheets.

Specialists ascribe the change to the rising reputation of versatile working, which has helped many working moms – usually the principle care supplier in UK households – to raised steadiness work and household commitments.

Distant work revolution

ONS evaluation in in the present day’s labour report describes how extra ladies staff are actually current within the workforce, in comparison with earlier years. This has been one of many predominant contributing components in direction of the change in common hours labored per week within the UK.

The largest change was triggered by the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2019 and the adoption of distant or hybrid working practices by UK companies.

Since then, the proportion of feminine staff working full time has elevated, with common weekly hours labored by ladies being half an hour increased in 2022 than in 2019.

It’s not simply ladies who’ve benefited from the shift in direction of versatile working. In whole, common weekly hours within the labour market have fallen by 1.3 hours, representing an enormous shift in fashionable work patterns as workers prioritise better work-life steadiness.

Nonetheless, with feminine staff taking over extra hours, it appears as if it’s their male colleagues most having fun with this enhance, because of the discount of their common work hours.

Staff swap up priorities

Kim Allcott is Associate at Allcott Business, a chartered surveyor. Allcott says workers are extra generally favouring versatile hours over remuneration packages.

“We have seen a pointy improve in versatile work requests for the reason that pandemic, when individuals re-evaluated their existence and positioned extra worth on time exterior of labor”, she feedback.

Males embracing versatile work choices might contribute to a extra balanced division of home labour in heterosexual partnerships. This frees up time for girls to pursue their profession objectives, increasing the expertise pool for brand spanking new hires and serving to to retain skilled workers who would possibly in any other case go away the workforce.

“Now we have additionally seen a rise in males taking day off to take care of dependents, suggesting that the gender steadiness [at home] is bettering,” Allcott provides.

Childcare disaster halts work features

Progress might nonetheless stall because of the childcare disaster. Demand for nursery locations and surging childminder prices have made it a close to unimaginable job for folks to search out appropriate childcare, forcing many ladies to decide on between their profession or spending extra time doing childcare themselves.

ONS information launched final yr reveals that the typical employment price for moms between the ages of 16 and 49 stands at solely 67%. That’s a transparent discrepancy in comparison with the 74% employment price amongst ladies with out dependents.

On prime of the exorbitant prices of childcare within the UK, one other root reason for this difficulty is poor flexibility from employers round work availability. In response to a report by world nursery supplier Vivid Horizons, 67% of working mother and father have needed to resort to utilizing their vacation entitlement to cowl childcare.

With some employers asking employees again to the workplace, specialists have warned that dropping this worker profit might undo the constructive change in feminine financial exercise.

On common, the ONS report reveals that males nonetheless work 5.4 hours extra per week than ladies. This means that, for a lot of ladies, excessive childcare prices nonetheless make part-time work more cost effective than paying nursery charges and doing full-time hours.