Jornada Laboral (Working day)

The 8/8/8 concept of time distribution refers to the ideal division of a day into three equal parts of 8 hours: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest or free time, and 8 hours of sleep. This model of time distribution emerged during the Industrial Revolution as a demand from workers to improve their working conditions and achieve a balance between work and personal life. However, it rarely applies to women’s daily routine.

This ideal can be confronted with the long hours that women work today. Although the situation has improved, women in general work many unpaid hours at the home; concretely, in the Basque Country, women perform a significant amount of unsalaried domestic and care work. According to recent statistics, women take on 67.2% of unpaid domestic work and care responsibilities, compared to men. This highlights a persistent gender imbalance in household labor, which reflects broader societal patterns of gender inequality. Globally, unpaid domestic and care work disproportionately affects women, with them contributing an average of three times more hours than men. In the Basque context, this unequal distribution of unpaid work is compounded by structural factors such as part-time employment, where 28% of women are employed part-time compared to only 9% of men, often due to caregiving responsibilities.