Claire Cain Miller had an interesting Upshot piece about differences in the way men and women divide child care and other unpaid household labor across countries. Some countries, notably the Nordic countries and the United States have made substantial progress in lessening the gap between women and men’s hours, although women still do substantially more unpaid work even in these countries (over 50 percent more in the United States). Other countries on the list, mostly those in Asia and southern Europe have done much worse by this measure, still having ratios of more than two to one.

While this is a very important issue which I would not want to trivialize, I couldn’t help but notice the substantial differences in total hours per day of unpaid labor reported across countries. The figure below sum the hours reported in each country for men and women.

Source: New York Times.

At low end is South Korea, where the total reported hours of unpaid work are just 4.5 per day. Next in line is China at 5.4 hours, and then Japan at 6.0 hours. The big outlier at the other extreme is Australia at 8.1 hours per day, a full hour below Denmark, where total hours are 7.1 per day. The United States comes in close to the average at 6.8 hours per day.