Stress, time use and gender

This paper studies the gender aspect of stress within a Scandinavian welfare state regime with high employment rates for both women and men. By applying an economic model, an extended model and a stress-level model, we find that higher incomes lead to stress among women, somewhat confirming findings for Australia, Germany, Canada, Korea, and the US. The number of working hours on the labour market, however, has no impact on stress. In terms of employed women, household work acts as de-stressors, whereas rush hour pressure, which is introduced for the first time here, acts as stressors. Moreover, the wife’s contribution to household work almost increases the husband’s feeling of being “always” stressed, while the husband’s contribution implies that the wife is nearly less stressed. These results underline the importance of including financial as well as cross-partner information when analysing the presence of stress.Stress, time allocation, leisure, gender