[anon7725]

Are average hours worked decreasing because we have more abundance and less need to work, or are they decreasing because the distribution of work is changing?

I find it hard to accept your claim because at the start of the industrial revolution there were far fewer women in the formal labor market than there are today.

[brainwad]

Well there were also barely any men in the formal labour market. Most people were peasants working their family farm + sharecropping on estates of the landed gentry. But that doesn't mean they weren't working hard - both sexes worked well over 3000 hours per year, to barely scrape by.