What do Australian women think about the distribution of domestic labour?
We spoke to five women about their experiences of the allocation of labour in the home. The interviews were revealing and fascinating.
The statistics are clear. Women do 21 hours more of unpaid work a week.
This month we finally had time to look at the most recent HILDA Statistical Report.* The findings tell a broad and interesting story about developments in Australian life over the last two decades — but the results concerning gender and domestic labour are conspicuous. In this important respect, it seems that Australian household dynamics, in many ways, have hardly changed at all… Women are still doing, on average, 21 hours more of unpaid work than men a week (in 2002 they were doing 28 hours more). Another question on the survey brings out just one of the consequences of this unequal arrangement: 26% of partnered mothers reported high levels of parenting stress compared to 16% of partnered fathers.
From Roger Wilkins, Esperanza Vera-Toscano and Ferdi Botha (2024) 'The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey: Selected Findings from Waves 1 to 21.' Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research, the University of Melbourne.
So we decided to talk to some women (who live with men) to discuss how they feel about the division of labour in their homes. As always, our goal was to bring the statistics to life by investigating lived experience.
Our qualitative research: we spoke to 5 women about their experiences of domestic labour.
Mandy, Margie, Claire, Kate and Georgie are all mothers who live with the fathers of their children. Three have young children, Margie’s 18-year-old son is finishing off school, and Mandy’s two kids, in their late twenties, have moved out.
‘We’re like project managers. Men can be chilled out because on some level they know things will be arranged for them.’
Most of these women were quick to point out that the work they’re doing isn’t necessarily visible or physical: it’s primarily a ‘mental load’ which comes from constantly monitoring what needs to be done. For instance, one participant describes how her husband cooks: ‘the kitchen’s totally clean, all the ingredients are prepped and put neatly in little bowls, but I’m like mate.. it takes you two hours to cook one meal’. In contrast, when she cooks, she’s also ‘supervising homework, and unpacking lunch boxes, and working at the same time, and then the kids start making slime’. For most of the women we spoke to this was a familiar scene. ‘We’re like project managers. Men can be chilled out because on some level they know things will be arranged for them.’ They can rock up to Christmas with some beer or wine confident that everything else will be taken care of.
This domestic project management also extends into social lives. Some of the women we spoke to felt that their male partners depend on them to facilitate their friendships and family relationships. One woman, for instance, told us that she always encourages her husband to contact his mum. ‘He just doesn’t otherwise. And as a mother, I know she’d want to hear about what her son is up to.’ But, as another pointed out, this is also about ‘looking after other women’. Indeed, our interviewees attested that being mindful of a kind of sisterhood is also why they are sure to bring a dish to a picnic or have their kids’ friends over. ‘Otherwise I know another mum’s going to have to do it.’
For Margie and Mandy, both in their 60s, caring for their elderly parents has been a significant component of their domestic labour. Both needed to do part-time care work while also looking after teenage kids. (They’re part of what’s referred to as the ‘sandwich generation’). And they also told us that, in their experience, it’s always daughters who find themselves with this responsibility, not sons. Neither were paid for this care work, which in one case lasted years, nor did they receive superannuation.
‘You can waste your life doing housework.’
To finish, we asked our research participants: what needs to happen? The groups were especially united around two answers. First, they said, male-dominated workplaces need to change. Georgie, for example, whose husband works in a female-dominated industry, said that fortunately ‘he’s been around to help a lot because his work understands — when I’m sick, or the kids or sick, or anything else, they say, go home to your wife’. For Kate, however, whose husband works in the corporate world, things are not so easy: ‘he could leave early to watch the kids play footy, but not really to watch the ballet concerts or to go to school assemblies’. Second, many of the women we spoke to have now begun to organise the housework in a more formal way. They sit down once a week or fortnight and review what’s been done and by whom, and what needs to be done and who should do it.
Of course, there are no quick fixes here. ‘You can waste your life doing housework,’ one woman said. Another responded: ‘Now we need to let go and let them do the work.’ But that sounds like a rallying cry — perhaps a women’s strike is in order. In 1975, afters years of organising, Icelandic women took off from work, cooking and caring for kids. This Women’s Day Off involved 90 percent of Icelandic women and their unions and advanced gender equality monumentally. By simply subtracting their domestic labour, they forced men across the country to realise just how much unrecognised, necessary work women are made responsible for. What’s the worst that could happen if Australian women walked? In Iceland in October 1975, shops sold out of sausages
Scenes from the Icelandic women's strike in October 1975. On an island of 220,000 people 25,000 women marched as pictured here. In total, 90% of women struck. Source: BBC News.
Marketers share some responsibility for gender stereotypes.
So what does marketing have to do with the unequal, gendered distribution of domestic labour in Australia? At the end of our wide-ranging discussions with Mandy, Margie, Claire, Kate and Georgie, we showed them two major Woolworths ads which have been running this year.
In ‘Woolworths packed with pride’ a proud mum watches her young son working at the checkout. She says, cheekily, ‘I’m really impressed with the way you packed that all away… you can do the same with your clothes tonight.’ But most of the women we spoke to rolled their eyes at this scenario: ‘Of course the daughter would already know how to pack the shopping!’
Meanwhile, ‘Helping you get your Woolies worth’ shows a mum getting dinner ready for her three hungry teenage boys. The dad is there too, but as Claire pointed out, ‘he’s just eating, not actually helping’. Most also agreed, however, that it’d be unrealistic, ‘tokenistic’, to depict the man cooking – instead, they laughed, he should be plonking a ‘man’s handbag’ on the dining table. (A man’s handbag, we learnt, is what people are calling pre-cooked, hot roast chicken.)
These critical reflections on a couple of ads turned into a stimulating conversation about social change and advertising in general. Many of our research participants felt that while the representation of ethnicities, cultures, and sexualities has become more diverse, there hasn’t been as much progress in how women and mothers are seen.
Indeed, in the 2012 edited collection The Rise of Marketing and Market Research, Sean Nixon considers how market research (especially in the groceries sector) contributed to the creation of the modern housewife in the post-war period: ‘Mrs Consumer’. It’s a rigorous, thought-provoking piece, and has had us thinking about how much responsibility major companies, with influential advertising campaigns, should take for the continuation of certain stereotypes and their ramifications. Should a household name like Woolworths take up a more activist role when it comes to the place of women in household dynamics? It’s a difficult question, yet an important one to keep in mind as marketers: with regards to domestic labour, the feminist movement still has a way to go.
* For those who don’t know, the Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey is a longitudinal study of Australian households, funded by the Department of Social Services and managed through the Melbourne Institute. We really recommend taking a look.
