You're gonna make it, after all!

A survey done by the Shanghai Municipal Women and Children Committee found that women in the city are doing less housework and relaxing more -- partly due to the growth of the housekeeping service industry.

This is considered to be one of the country’s many developments. Perhaps they just wanted something more to add to their list, however. These women are still spending nearly three hours on household chores every day! As this is a decrease of 36 minutes compared to five years ago, leisure time has increased to almost four free hours per day, which is 24 more minutes per day than they had in the year 2000. But the question remains: If you spend about three hours doing chores and four hours doing leisure activities, how can you hold a job?

You can’t. Just 38.3 percent of the city’s workforce is women, a decrease from 42.3 percent five years ago. Experts said that job discrimination against women is strong in the city and that it could become worse if nothing is done about it.

Fortunately, the Shanghai municipal government is helping unemployed women by providing free training in skills (we’ve heard about free cooking classes for the unemployed, for example) and giving preferential treatment to women who want to start businesses. It is also looking better for the future generation who are now studying at colleges and universities. “The gender difference in higher education has been eradicated,” said the report -- 50.1 percent of college and university students are women. Now, if we could only do something about China's other gender imbalance problem.

Title of this post comes from the theme song of the Mary Tyler Moore Show.