How to Spot Fake News

Reliability of News Outlets
Debunking the Gender Leisure Gap Myth
Fake News
The Pew Research article by Drake (2013) shows that men spend more time in leisure activity than women, and the argument that has developed from this news article is that there is a leisure gap between men and women that further shows the state of gender inequality in America today. While the data from the American Time Use Survey that the article cites does show that statistically speaking men spend more time in leisure activities than women, the data itself does not tell the whole story—so the article is definitely slanted in a way so as to suggest that the leisure gap is real and that men are still taking advantage of women. After all, the title of the article is “Another Gender Gap: Men Spend More Time in Leisure Activities”—so it is definitely not a stretch to guess that the author is trying to show that gender inequality is seen even in the amount of leisure time taken between the sexes. What the article does not explain is that leisure is actually experienced differently by the sexes, as Codina and Pestana (2019) explain in their study published in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2019. Codina and Pestana (2019) found in their survey of the ways in which men and women experience leisure that that “men have more leisure time, but women have a more positive leisure experience and time perspectives than men” (p. 2513). Codina and Pestana (2019) concluded that “women enjoy themselves more with less available leisure time and are more positive with regard to time orientations” (p. 2513). So what they actually revealed was that there are differences between the sexes that do make talk of gender equality sound slightly absurd. Men may take more leisure time but it is likely that because of their biology they experience leisure differently than women do and need to engage in different leisure activities for a longer period of time to achieve the same effect that women achieve from shorter and different leisure experiences.
However, one would not know this without pursuing the matter independently and going beyond the Pew Research site. Pew Research has a strong reputation for publishing facts—but clearly the article written by Drake (2013) consists of facts and an interpretation of the facts that simply does not align with real research conducted in the field by researchers. Media Bias/Fact Check (2020). ranks Pew Research as Very High in terms of standards of reporting and calls it the Least Biased source of information available in the world.
Yet what is seen with the Drake (2013) article is a clear indication that bias towards the Left is evident, at least with this article. My thought process in reviewing this article was that, yes, those numbers show that men take more leisure time than women. But I wanted to know more about what other researchers had found on this topic, so I used Google Scholar and the keywords “gender leisure gap” to find articles that explored the issue, and this is what led me to the study by Codina and Pestana (2019). They confirmed that, yes, statistically speaking there is a leisure gap between the sexes but that this gap does not mean what people think it means. People who see the numbers—people like Drake—immediately leap to the conclusion that it is just one more instance of male privilege. However, what Codina and Pestana (2019) point out is that privilege has nothing to do with it. It is simply a fact of nature that people are interpreting wrongly based on their own socio-political biases.
Thus, even a highly-rated site like Pew Research can apparently post fake news. It just goes to show that one cannot generalize and should do independent research no matter what the source is.
References
Codina, N., & Pestana, J. V. (2019). Time Matters Differently in Leisure Experience for Men and Women: Leisure Dedication and Time Perspective. International journal of environmental research and public health, 16(14), 2513.
Drake, B. (2013). Another Gender Gap: Men Spend More Time in Leisure Activities. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/10/another-gender-gap-men-spend-more-time-in-leisure-activities/
Media Bias/Fact Check. (2020). Retrieved from https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/pew-research/