The Great Recession and the Occupy Wall Street upheaval have finally made the distribution of income a topic of public discussion again, but seldom do we speak about the distribution of time. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working class movements struggled not just for higher wages, but also for shorter hours, as they successively won the ten hour day, the eight hour day, and the forty hour week. In recent years, however, reductions in work time have been off the agenda. At the household level, with more families containing two full-time workers, the hours of paid employment have risen dramatically. For radicals, the demand for reduced working time is a reclamation of the age-old insistence that leisure time is essential to a free and prosperous humanity: it was Marx who said, approvingly quoting an anonymous polemic, that “wealth is disposable time, and nothing more.” Yet time ought to be on the agenda for liberals, as well. Research suggests that workers are actually more productive when they work shorter schedules; taking some of our increased economic productivity in the form of free time rather than more commodities would be better for the environment; and, as Germany’s experience with work sharing has shown, reducing hours does less economic and human damage than firing employees in a weak economy.

And there is another, less widely appreciated reason to be concerned with working time: the issue is fundamentally linked to feminism and the struggle for gender equality. The length of the wage-working day is intimately connected to the time devoted to unwaged work — the unpaid cooking, cleaning, shopping, care of children and elders, and so on. Reducing time spent in wage labor creates more time for these other tasks, which according to a recent OECD report are as time consuming as paid labor. But the question then becomes whether this work will be shared equally between the sexes. The OECD study also found that American women daily spend nearly two hours more than men on unpaid work.

Given that fact, there is a danger that any reform which makes it easier to reduce paid working time will inadvertently tend to reinforce the gender division of labor, in which men do more paid work and women do more of the less-appreciated work in the home. Research suggests that women will generally be more likely to reduce their hours than men when the opportunity presents itself, for a complex set of cultural, political, and economic reasons. Women then face discrimination in the labor market as employers begin to assume that men will work more hours. This has become a matter of increasing concern even in countries such as the Netherlands, which offers a beguiling model for shorter-hours advocates due to its strong protections for part-timers and large number of part-time jobs. For supporters of what Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers call the “dual caregiver, dual earner” model, in which men and women participate equally in both paid and unpaid labor, exacerbating these inequalities would be an unfortunate unintended consequence of a policy meant to shorten the work week for everyone.