Australian men are not doing any more housework than they were two decades ago, with women doing 50 per cent more housework than men throughout the average week, according to the latest report from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey.
In 2022, men spent an average of 12.8 hours on housework per week, which is the same amount of time as they were spending in 2002. Meanwhile, women are spending almost two hours more in paid or unpaid work than men throughout a typical week.
“We found that women take over a greater share of housework and care than their male partner in almost every employment scenario,” said report author Dr Inga Lass. “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.”
The analysis, which has been tracking more than 20,000 people (including children) in 9,000 households since 2001, found both men and women are spending more time in paid work than they were 20 years ago.
On average, women in 2022 spent 28.5 hours a week in employment (up from 22.2 hours in 2002) while men spent 37.9 hours (up from 37.7 in 2002). In 2022, men spent 5.5 hours a week caring for children or loved ones (a slim thirty minute rise from 5 hours in 2002), while women spent 10.7 hours a week caring — a rise from 10.1 hours spent in 2002.
Dr Lass said that the survey also revealed 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,” she said.
The HILDA survey documents the same group of Australians over the course of their lives, charting their household and family relationships, childcare, employment, education, income, expenditure, health and wellbeing, attitudes and values on a variety of subjects, and various life events and experiences.
Funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services, the latest study also revealed that economic inequality has reached a high not witnessed in more than 20 years, with the Gini coefficient, an index to measure inequality, rising above 0.31 for the first time in the survey’s history.
Coined by Italian statistician Corrado Gini in the early 1900s, the index is a way of analysing how income distribution within a society compares with a similar society where everyone earned exactly the same amount. If every person within a country earned the same amount, that country would have a coefficient of 0. If all of the money was earned by one person, it would have a measure of 1.
In the latest Hilda survey, more than half of respondents reported that their real income dropped between 2021 and 2022.
According to lead author and Co-Director of the HILDA Survey, Professor Roger Wilkins, “After the initial effect of the pandemic, higher incomes in Australia have grown faster relative to middle incomes.”
“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,” Professor Wilkins said.
The survey, managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne, revealed that single parents are frequently the demographic most negatively impacted by shifting economic factors.
For single parents, the child care costs per child have risen by 76 per cent since 2006, while for couple parents, the increase has been 48 per cent. During the 2001-2022 period, single parents were the most likely family type to experience poor mental health and took the longest to recover from poor mental health.
With Australia’s poverty rate sitting at 25 per cent, single-parent families were four times more likely to experience poverty than couple-parent families. Single-parent families also had the lowest average wealth levels.
Meanwhile, problem gambling is also rising, with 12.9 per cent of surveyed men being classified as “at-risk” gamblers. Between 2015 and 2022, there was a 66 per cent spike in the proportion of men involved in sports betting. When it comes to poker machines, women were outspending men, spending an average of $284.96 a month gambling on the machines, compared to $208.65 for men.
“Being a smoker is related to both higher incidence of, and expenditure on, gambling-related activities,” researchers revealed. “First Nations women and men are 5.2 and 6.7 percentage points, respectively, more likely to be gamblers compared to non-First Nations women and men.”