Despite evidence that this gap is narrowing, women are still doing 20.9 hours a week more unpaid work than their male partners, according to the 16th annual Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey by the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Institute.
Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) collects information annually on a wide range of aspects of life from 17,500 people in the same 9,500 households, allowing researchers to see how their lives are changing over time.
The worst disparity is between couples with dependent children, although there has been a reduction in this gap, from women doing 28.8 hours per week of unpaid work in 2002 to 20.9 hours in 2019.
“The reduction in the gap has partially come from males increasing their unpaid work (from an average of 24.7 hours in 2002 to 27.8 hours in 2019), but the bigger contributor has been the reduction in unpaid work undertaken by females (from 53.5 hours in 2002 to 48.7 hours in 2019),” said the HILDA report.
Housework the largest form of unpaid work
“The gap has also narrowed somewhat for couples without dependent children, again both because males have increased their time spent on unpaid work and females have decreased their time spent on unpaid work. Since 2010, single-parent females have on average decreased the time spent on unpaid work, prior to which there was a considerable rise in the mean time spent on unpaid work from 2007.”
Housework was found to be the largest form of unpaid work, followed by caring for children, with the amount of unpaid work escalating sharply after the birth of a first child.
Proof then that we still have some way to go on gender equality – men, grab your mops!
