The male labor force participation rate has been declining for decades, dropping from nearly 90% down to 69.3% as of now. Using survey respondent data from the 2003-2017 American Time Use Survey, this paper investigates how nonworking males choose to allocate their time in a day. This paper examines how the time allocation has changed over time for males ages 25-34 as well as for those who have less than a high school degree because these two samples showed significant changes in time allocation. For the other samples, ages 35-44 and 45-54 as well as all education levels higher than a high school degree, they did not show much change in their time allocation between males and females.
This paper finds that when not participating in the labor force, males do not substitute market work with household production, but instead spend more time on leisure activities. Females who are not in the labor force instead increase their household production. Observing this trend over time, this paper finds that men contribute even less household production in 2017 than in previous years. This is in part due to the emergence of luxury leisure activities such as computers and video games.