Women still doing bulk of housework, survey finds

The gender gap around household chores is closing — but it’s not really because men are doing more.

Women are doing less unpaid work around the home than in previous surveys.

The gender gap around who does the bulk of household work is closing, but mainly because women are downing tools.

The latest snapshot of how the nation carries out its domestic duties also shows we are spending less time on them.

The findings flow from the University of Melbourne’s long running Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey released on Tuesday.

Within households, women still do close to double the amount of unpaid work than men, with the gender gap “particularly large” for couples of dependent children.

While this gap has shrunk from 28.8 hours per week in 2002 to 20.9 hours in 2019, the report concludes this is mainly because women are doing less.

“The reduction in the gap has partially come from men 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 women, from 53.5 hours in 2002 to 48.7 hours in 2019,” the report says.

Other key findings in the survey which involves interviews with 17,500 people in 9,500 households include:

— Young people are more stressed than ever – and that was before Covid hit. People aged 15 to 24 consistently report the highest levels of distress with 30 per cent of this age group reporting distress in 2019, up from 21.2 per cent in 2007.

— Young people are staying at home for longer, particularly women. The number of females between the ages of 22 and 25 who live with their parents has jumped by nearly 20 per cent since 2001, now making up half of all women in that age bracket.

— Household disposable income growth has slowed but income inequality is around where it was two decades ago.

Unpaid work covers items such as household chores and looking after children.

It also includes voluntary work although the report notes this is by far the smallest component.

There has been a downward trend in the time spent on housework, falling from 11 hours per week at the start of the century to 9.5 hours per week in 2019.

Time spent on outdoor tasks has also trended downwards, declining from 4.3 hours per week to 3.4 hours per week over the same period.

Women with young children continue to carry the biggest load.

The average time spent on unpaid work by mothers with a child under 6 was 60.8 hours per week in 2019.

This fell to 43.3 hours per week where the youngest child was aged 6 to 12 and 33.6 hours per week where the youngest child was aged 13 to 17.

For men, the corresponding averages were 31.6 hours, 27.1 hours and 22.4 hours.