Australia is not the greatest country in the world when it comes to work/life balance - Women's Agenda

Australia is not the greatest country in the world when it comes to work/life balance

Apparently us Australians have it pretty good. So good that we’re on top of the developed world when it comes to the best country to live according to the latest Better Life Index.

And it’s so good that we’ve seen plenty of headlines this week on just how happy we are, and reminders that we’re the ‘lucky’ country after all.

Australia’s bragging rights may well be deserved if you add up the 11 different rankings covering areas like happiness, health and housing affordability that the Better Life Index uses to assess the 34 developed nations it surveyed — even though the survey explicitly states that there is no overall ‘winner’. But if you judge the ‘greatest country on earth’ according to more specific criteria like work-life balance, then you’ll be disappointed living in Australia.

Yes, we’re apparently pretty happy, at least compared to our developed counterparts. When asked to rate our happiness level on a scale of one to ten, we came up with an average of 7.2, above the OECD average of 6.6.

And yes, we’re number one when it comes to ‘civic engagement’ based on voter turn-out (compulsory voting helps), our willingness to help each other out, and how much we trust our political institutions. We’ve been given the number two spot for quality of housing, and the second spot again for health — our life expectancy at birth is now 82 — and we’re well above average when it comes to average household income.

But when it comes to work-life balance, which covers the number of hours spent working and in leisure activities, we fall well down the list. The problem is that more than 14% of us are working more than 50 hours a week. Of the 11 criteria, our lowest score is given for work-life balance, where we received just 6.5. We take the 30th position when it comes to hours worked, and the 25th spot for time devoted to leisure and personal care.

And the survey finds that if the number of hours spent working is a measure of productivity and success in the office (which on Women’s Agenda we don’t think it is), then women have some catching up to do. More than 21% of men are working long hours compared to just 6% of women.

We’re spending somewhere between one-tenth and one-fifth of our time on unpaid work, unsurprising women are losing more hours here than men. And while Australians devote 14.4 hours of our day to person care — including eating, sleeping, leisure and socialising — that figure was behind the OECD average of 14.9 hours.

More than 73% of Australians aged 15 to 64 have a paid job, above the OECD average of 66%.

But parents reported that they’d like to have more children, but were not sure how they could stop working. And the difficulties we have accessing affordable childcare may reflect our low rates of childcare enrolments. We’re spending less on childcare services than most OECD countries with 0.4% of GDP going to childcare compared with the OECD average of 0.6%. Just 40% of children under the age of six were found to be enrolled in formal childcare.

Indeed, the report authors have some advice for Australia, notably that we should extend childcare support programs to better assist working parents — especially sole parents, 50% of whom were found to be out of work.

Is Australia a great place for work-life balance?

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