Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Physical activity surveillance is built around leisure-time exercise, a domain in which women appear less active than men, and largely excludes the unpaid domestic and care work that women perform disproportionately. We asked how much of the observed sex gap is produced by that measurement design. We analysed the Second Chilean National Time Use Survey (2023; analytic n = 28,477, representing 15.1 million urban residents aged 12 and older) and converted time in exercise, unpaid domestic work, caregiving, paid work and travel into metabolic equivalent hours per typical day using the 2024 Adult Compendium, applying recipient-age-specific caregiving values, occupation-specific paid-work values and a sex-specific exercise value from a national sport survey. Complex-survey estimation was applied, and attainment of the World Health Organization aerobic equivalent (at least 8.33 MET-hours per week from activities of at least 3 MET) was computed under three inclusive definitions. Considering exercise alone, women expended less than half as much as men (female-to-male ratio 0.44). Non-labour obligatory expenditure was nearly twice as high in women (ratio 1.91), and total expenditure across all five domains approached parity (16.74 vs 15.02 MET-hours per day, ratio 0.90). The sex gap in aerobic-equivalent attainment fell from 12.1 to 3.6 percentage points as the definition widened, and in the lowest income quintile expenditure was identical by sex (ratio 0.998). Findings were robust to five sensitivity analyses. Exercise-centred metrics overstate the sex gap by omitting unpaid work, materially changing who is classified as sufficiently active in urban populations.</p>