Paid work causes Canadians most stress, study reveals; Time crunch is also felt with housework, child care
Vancouver Sun
November 26, 2007 
By: Shannon Proudfoot

Children, aging parents and household responsibilities might be gobbling up people's evenings and weekends, but a new Canadian study reveals it's their paid jobs that cause them the most stress.

What's more, the type of work, timing of shifts or holding down more than one job isn't as important to "time-crunch" pressure as the sheer number of hours spent on the job. The good news is this stress declines as people age, the authors say. The bad news is that it's likely to get worse before it gets better for most Canadians.

"People are working more hours," says Robert Andersen, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto who co-authored the study. "We work more than most countries already; there's no indication the number of hours is going to drop."

Paid work is seven times more stressful for men than "unpaid work" such as care of children and seniors, housework, yard work and home maintenance, he says. Women are five times more stressed by their day jobs than by their household responsibilities, but they report higher levels of "time-crunch" from both sources than men did.

"No doubt that the amount of hours of unpaid work are more stressful for women than they are for men," says co-author Roderic Beaujot, a sociology professor at the University of Western Ontario. "I think for men the unpaid work looks, at least for some, more like leisure and has that flexibility."

Andersen and Beaujot also looked at how different family arrangements affect people's stress levels. They found that the traditional "breadwinner" model in which the man does most of the paid work and the woman looks after things at home is actually the most stressful for everyone involved.

"It's kind of nice that it's a model that's in decline," says Beaujot. "Nonetheless, it still represents close to half of couples."

Perhaps not surprisingly, "men's double burden" families in which he does most of the work outside the house and also within it is the least stressful for women, followed by "gender reversed" couples in which she mostly brings home the bacon and he does the laundry. The results suggest men are also least stressed by that arrangement, though the numbers aren't as stark.

The study, published in the Canadian Journal of Sociology, is based on responses from almost 6,000 Canadians aged 30 to 59….