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The Guardian
06-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Australian women are doing 50% more housework than men. It's creating ‘volcanic levels of resentment'
This International Women's Day, Meg's* life will feel no less chaotic than it does on any other day. Like her husband, the 43-year-old from Sydney works five days a week – but she also has a second job, freelancing in the evenings. They have three young children, a mortgage and no family in Australia. 'I'm always whizzing around cleaning like a mad Tasmanian devil,' the creative director says. 'As soon as you walk through the door, you see a thousand things that need to be done. 'Last night, my husband asked me if he had any clean boxer shorts – and the sad thing is, I'm the only one who knows the answer.' Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email She is not alone. The latest Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (Hilda) survey shows that in 2022, men spent an average of 12.8 hours a week on housework – exactly the same amount as they did 20 years earlier – while women do 50% more (an average of 18.4 hours). In heterosexual couples with children under 15, men did one-third less housework, along with about half the childcare of their female partners. And, while women were spending less time on housework than they were in 2002, they were doing more hours of paid work and more unpaid care work. All up, women had nearly two fewer hours a week for themselves than men – and they're not OK with it. Dr Inga Lass, the report's co-author and senior research fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, found that women found the division of unpaid labour was unfair and were less satisfied with their share than men. 'I've got so used to doing housework on top of everything else that I'm just a well-oiled machine – that every now and then erupts into volcanic levels of resentment,' Meg says. 'And then I get up and do it all over again.' 'This is not a surprise to me,' political economist Prof Elizabeth Hill says of the Hilda findings. She emphasises that, even when a woman was employed and her male partner was not, she still did most of the unpaid care. Her own research with the University of Sydney reflects the very same finding: it is women's lives that have bent to the modern demands of earning, procreating and housekeeping – not men's. 'I don't think there are many households where the parents are feeling that it's particularly sustainable at this point in time,' says Georgie Dent, head of advocacy group The Parenthood. There is another way of looking at the data however, says Peter Siminski of the University of Technology Sydney. We're doing less housework overall (thanks to technology and outsourcing) and the figures reflect a positive – if slow – narrowing of gender gaps around housework. Yet Siminski's own research, again, mirrors Hilda: how much we can earn does not impact how work is divided at home. Gender norms do, Lass suggests. 'I think it starts with how boys and girls are being raised, and what they're being taught. There's this hypothesis that women are often more judged if the house is a bit messy, while men are cut some slack.' Even accounting for an increase in men's housework because women have decreased theirs, 'women end up doing more overall when you count together employment and housework and childcare. 'And this looks to me like women still feel compelled to get more done in the house,' she says. As pervasive as our expectations – or those of our partners – is the structure of our labour markets, care systems, schools, workplace practices and policy settings, which, Hill says, presume that women are more interested in, and capable of, care and domestic labour than men. (Stay-at-home dads – of which there were 80,000 in 2018, according to the Australian Institute of Family Studies – are welcome and important changes at the margins, but make little impact on the overall numbers, she says.) Australia and New Zealand is the third highest region for unpaid domestic work done by women, according to UN data from 2023. Only in central and southern Asia, northern Africa and western Asia did women do more unpaid care and domestic work. A 2024 report by the Australian Institute of Family Studies' Dr Jenny Baxter showed that in 78% of couple families in Australia, the mental load was always or usually carried by the mother. Hill's research found that the burden of care responsibilities fundamentally shaped women's daily lives and capacity to work. Some were resentful, others were resigned – most were exhausted. The upshot is that both men and women miss out. There are known to be significant benefits for men who are involved in family care in terms of their health and wellbeing, says Hill. But when they do try to mix work and care, research shows they can face an economic penalty and discrimination in training and promotion opportunities. 'We talk about the motherhood penalty – there seems to be the emergence of a kind of a parenthood penalty, and we need to push back against that really strongly,' she says. 'It's kind of unsurprising given that's been women's experience for decades.' For Meg, there's a sense of never getting ahead, even with more childcare. Lass suggests this is because of increasing expectations around raising children and their exposure to extracurricular activities. We have more efficiency-boosting technology, but our smartphones blur the lines between work and family time while turbocharging stress and pressure, says Dent. In 2002, housework was not interrupted by the patter of school WhatsApp updates. 'It's triage, making a mental hierarchy of everything,' Meg says of her constant domestic juggling. 'And don't get me started on sports – you've got to sign them up, jigsaw them into the right classes, sort out their kit: that's the mental-load shit.' Meg says her transformation from being an equal partner in her relationship began when she gave birth for the first time. It's an observation that is borne out, verbatim, in the Hilda data. Up until having a baby, women do roughly the same share of housework and paid work as their male partners, then roles dramatically diverge. 'Having babies just shifts the dynamic [within] couples so much. It puts women on this invisible back foot. You're at home all the time and that becomes your realm, so you start doing all the domestic chores,' she says. Get it right and get it right early, the data suggests. The birth of a first child is what sets a household's patterns around care and housework. Hill says that in Nordic countries – where there is a significant investment in non-gendered parental leave – fathers who care for their infants continue to be involved closely in the care of their children in the subsequent years. Dent says Australia has not reached the tipping point where extended paid parental leave meaningfully shifts how couples care for their children and run their households. 'In the countries where they have actually increased men's participation in caregiving in a really meaningful sense, that has never happened by accident,' she says. Alongside an acceleration in investment into paid parental leave and childcare systems, Australia needs more good flexible work – jobs that involve training and career opportunities. 'We're heading in the right direction, but we need to go much faster, and we need to include all aspects of society,' says Hill. Also, she says, 'frankly, men need to step up'. That's true to Meg's experience. 'I'm my own worst enemy because I don't delegate –' Meg stops herself mid-sentence. 'Or, is that just another thing I'm taking responsibility for?' * Name has been changed
The Guardian
05-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Australian men doing no more housework than they were 20 years ago – still 50% less than women
Australian men are not doing any more housework than they were 20 years ago, and women are doing 50% more housework than men, a national study has revealed. Now in its 19th iteration, the annual Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (Hilda) report uses data collected over more than two decades, with the same 17,000 people interviewed year-on-year. The latest report shows that in 2022, men spent an average of 12.8 hours on housework, the same amount of time as they were spending in 2002. Women, comparatively, spent an average of 18.4 hours a week on housework. On top of this, financial inequality in Australia is at its highest since 2001 and things are getting harder for single parents, who have seen a 76% increase in childcare costs per child since 2006. The analysis found both men and women are spending more time in paid work than they were 20 years ago. Women in 2022 averaged 28.5 hours a week in employment (compared with 22.2 hours in 2002) while men spent 37.9 hours (up from 37.7 in 2002). Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email Men are spending 30 minutes more caring for their children and disabled or elderly relatives (5.5 hours a week in 2022, up from 5 hours in 2002), but the report said this has not been a continuous upwards trend. The peak, 6.1 hours, was in 2014. In 2022, women still took on most of the caring duties – almost double the amount of men – with 10.7 hours a week caring in 2022, an increase on the 10.1 hours spent in 2002. The report also shows men are more satisfied than women with the division of unpaid work. Men's satisfaction with the division of labour was high until the pandemic hit, when it started to decline before reaching an all-time low of 7.6 out of 10 for the division of housework tasks and 7.7 out of 10 for the division of childcare. The majority of men believed they did their fair share around the house, the report said, with 58% of childless men and 55.6% of those with dependent children agreeing. Dr Inga Lass, the report's author, said the data showed women take over a greater share of housework and care than their male partner in almost every employment scenario. 'While women do significantly more paid work than they used to, this divide of unpaid work at home has not changed significantly since we started measuring in 2002,' she said. 'The survey also allows us to see that men are overall more satisfied than women are with the current division of unpaid work around the house. Most women feel that they do more than their fair share at home, whereas men usually believe they share the housework and care fairly with their partner.' Financial inequality in Australia is at its highest since the Hilda survey started in 2001, with more than half (51.2%) of respondents saying their real income decreased between 2021 and 2022. Even when wealth grew very strongly (between 2002 and 2006 and between 2018 and 2022) the proportion of people experiencing a real increase in household wealth did not exceed 73.2%. It means at least 26.8% likely experienced a decline in real wealth. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion While the economic support offered to Australians during the Covid-19 pandemic helped reduced inequality in 2020, the following two years saw a significant uptick. The Gini index represents a scale between complete equality and complete inequality. If every citizen earned the same amount, that country would have a coefficient of 0. If all of the money was earned by one person, it would be measured as a 1. In 2022, the Gini coefficient – a common measure of overall inequality – rose above 0.31 for the first time in the survey's history. Roger Wilkins, a co-director of the Hilda survey, said the gap between the middle and upper classes was growing. 'After the initial effect of the pandemic, higher incomes in Australia have grown faster relative to middle incomes,' Wilkins said. 'At the same time, the relative growth of lower incomes has declined, which drives inequality up and makes it harder for poorer Australians to move into higher income groups.' Single parents have seen a 76% increase in childcare costs per child since 2006, the report found, compared with a 48% increase for couple parents. Over the 2001-2022 period, single parents were the most likely family type to have poor mental health and took the longest to recover from poor mental health. The report also found one in four single-parent families live in poverty – more than four times the rate for double-parent families (6.2%). The risk of problem gambling is increasing, with 12.9% of surveyed men classified as 'at-risk' gamblers (defined as causing negative consequences and a possible loss of control). That was up from 10.3% in 2015. In 2015, 5.7% of women identified at least one harmful consequence of their gambling, whereas in 2022 6.4% of women did so. There was also a 66% increase in the proportion of men who bet on sports in the seven years from 2015 to 2022, the report found. Fewer people in Australia are using poker machines, but those who are were spending significantly more than they were seven years ago – and women are spending more than men. Women spent an average of $284.96 a month gambling on poker machines, with men spending $208.65.
