Men's Time Is Not Created Equal. It's Created By Women

And That Has Harmful Consequences For Children, Women, And The World

I learned something about time long before I had the language to describe it.

My father met my mother when she was 20. They would go on to have five children together. I grew up watching him build multiple successful businesses, and later become a pastor. He was, in every visible sense, a man who worked. But he was also, unmistakably, a man who lived.

He had time. Time to travel, to visit friends at will, to sleep undisturbed behind a closed door while my mother shooed us away. And I loved him deeply, perhaps even more than I loved my mother. But even as a child, I could not ignore the imbalance unfolding in plain sight.

Because my mother had no time.

She was always in motion, cooking, cleaning, managing errands, supporting homework, attending to five children whose needs never aligned neatly or paused conveniently. She was perpetually available and perpetually exhausted, stretched between responsibility and expectation with very little space for recovery. The strain showed itself not only in her voice, raised in frustration over lost shoes or unfinished schoolwork, but eventually in her body. Before she turned 40, she suffered a partial stroke. I remember walking alongside her in the middle of the night to the nearest hospital. Luckily, it was reversible.

My father, meanwhile, remained admired, respected, even revered.

These two realities were not unrelated.

What I witnessed in my home was not a personal failure or an isolated dynamic. It was a pattern, one that is reproduced across households, cultures, and economies. Women carry the work that sustains life, raising children, maintaining homes, caring for aging parents, and managing the invisible labor that keeps everything functioning. Because women do this work, men are freed from it.

Globally, women perform between two and three times more unpaid care and domestic labor than men, spending nearly three additional hours each day on these responsibilities. Even under optimistic projections, that gap will persist for decades.

This is not a marginal difference in lifestyle; it is a structural redistribution of time. And time, more than any other resource, determines the shape of a life.

When women’s time is consumed by care, they lose the ability to accumulate advantage elsewhere.

The consequences are visible in labor markets, where women’s participation is constrained by caregiving responsibilities, and in income trajectories that never fully recover from time taken out or reduced. They are visible in health outcomes, where chronic overwork and mental load translate into higher stress, burnout, and long-term physical consequences. And they are visible in the quieter erosion of possibility, the ambitions deferred, the rest postponed, the self continuously subordinated to the needs of others.

What is less often acknowledged is the corresponding gain.

Free Time Gender Gap Report 2022

Men’s time expands where women’s contracts. Men’s time is not created equally. It is created by women. In the United States and around the world, women have disproportionately less free time than men, and mothers spend 3x as much time on unpaid home and family work as fathers. Across OECD countries, the pattern is consistent: men report more leisure time, not because they have fewer hours in the day, but because they are less encumbered by the labor required to sustain it.

This is not incidental. It is produced.

As I grew older, I began to recognize the same dynamic beyond my own home. In the wider community, men routinely exercised a kind of temporal freedom that women simply did not possess. They had time for socializing, for late evenings out, for pursuits that existed entirely outside the demands of caregiving. Some had time for affairs even as their wives navigated pregnancy, childcare, and the continuous work of maintaining a household.

The question was never asked explicitly, but it was always present: who is holding everything together?

The answer, invariably, was women.

This asymmetry does more than redistribute labor. It redistributes responsibility, and with it, accountability. A system that does not require men to participate fully in the work of care creates distance, from the daily realities of dependence, from the fragility of life, from the cumulative consequences of neglect. Care is not merely a set of tasks; it is a mode of engagement with other human beings. It demands attention, patience, and responsiveness. It binds individuals to the outcomes of their actions in immediate and unavoidable ways.

When that work is unevenly distributed, so too are those forms of accountability.

I think often about the men whose names appear in cases like the Epstein files. Men who seemed to have endless time to travel, to move freely, to indulge in unspeakable harm against young girls. That kind of time is not incidental. It exists because someone else is holding life together.

I think about the Ozoro Festival and many others like it that exist across the world, instances where groups of men gather for days, even weeks, in environments where women are sexually exploited, violated, and harmed. And I cannot ignore the same question that keeps returning:

Where do men get the time to do this?

Because women do not have it.

Women are not flying freely between cities or disappearing for days at a time. Women are at home, holding everything together, raising children, caring for families, managing the daily realities of survival.

And that contrast is not accidental.

It is structural.

A society that frees men from the responsibilities of care while binding women to them creates a dangerous asymmetry, not only in time, but in accountability. It creates a world where one group is anchored to consequence, and another is given the space to move without it.

And we cannot continue to look away from what becomes possible inside that imbalance.

This is not to argue that men’s relative freedom from care produces harm in a simple or deterministic way. Human behavior is more complex than that. But it is to insist that the normalization of male disengagement from care cannot be disentangled from the broader patterns of inequality that shape women’s lives and children’s outcomes. A society that systematically frees one group from the responsibilities of sustaining life while overburdening another will inevitably reproduce imbalance, not only in time, but in power, opportunity, and wellbeing.

Children grow up inside this arrangement. They learn, often unconsciously, who is expected to give and who is permitted to take, who is accountable to the needs of others and who can move more freely through the world. Research consistently shows that when fathers are more involved in caregiving, children experience better developmental outcomes and mothers face less stress. The inverse is also true: when care is uneven, the strain is borne disproportionately by women, with consequences that reverberate across families and generations.

We tend to treat care as a private matter, a domestic concern, or at best a social issue to be addressed through marginal adjustments. But care is not peripheral. It is foundational. It is the infrastructure upon which all other forms of economic and social activity depend.

To ignore its unequal distribution is to misunderstand the mechanics of inequality itself.

What I saw as a child was not simply a difference in personality or preference. It was a system that elevated one life at the expense of another, even within the same household. My father’s freedom was real, but it was not self-generated. It was made possible, in large part, by my mother’s labor.

That is the truth we continue to avoid.

Women are doing the work that gives men their freedom. And until that imbalance is addressed, not rhetorically, but materially, the consequences will continue to shape the lives of women, the development of children, and the structure of society itself.

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Blessing Adesiyan is a chemical engineer, climate and care economist, Editor-In-Chief of The Care Gap and the Founder and Chief Care Officer of Caring Africa, advancing care as essential economic infrastructure through systems change, policy, and investment.