Australia’s biggest industry has no payroll, operates 24 hours a day and almost every adult contributes, but there are no payslips, job descriptions or regulated hours and there is no reliable measure of who manages the work.
The unpaid labour involved in cooking meals, washing clothes, caring for children and maintaining homes makes the rest of the Australian economy possible.
But in research that shows some things change, some don’t, Gianni La Cava, an economist at the e61 Institute, found 31 billion hours of unpaid labour were performed each year in Australia – between nine and 14 times more than the time spent on the largest sectors for paid hours: healthcare, social assistance and construction.
Most know unpaid “home production” is substantial. Few will be surprised that women, especially mothers, do more of it. But less well known is just how large the workload has become, how slowly it has been redistributed, and how sharply it changes when children arrive.
In the year that a first child is born, mothers’ unpaid work rises by about 53 hours a week and fathers’ by about 15. Mothers take on nearly four-fifths of the additional workload. At the same time, mothers’ paid work falls by about 18 hours a week, while fathers’ paid work rises by about two hours.
Further, while women’s participation in the workforce has soared, they have taken on much more of the “mental load” required to manage unpaid labour in households. Women still do much more unpaid work than men, falling from about 35 hours a week in 1992 to 31 hours in 2024. Men’s rose from about 19 hours to 22.
But the anticipation and monitoring required to keep a household running while working has largely remained with women: in an Australian Institute of Family Studies survey, 78 per cent of respondents said mothers always or usually handled the planning and co-ordination of children’s activities; 19 per cent said it was shared equally.
Putting a dollar value on unpaid work is difficult because hourly rates of pay vary. Depending on the wage used, estimates range from roughly $1.1 trillion to $1.6 trillion, or about 40 per cent to 58 per cent of Australia’s GDP. Queensland University of Technology economist Dr Leonora Risse told the Herald’s Matt Wade that Australian women do the equivalent of $40,092 in unpaid labour a year.
The gender gap has closed a little during the past two decades, but women still undertake 8.2 unpaid work hours more than men each week.
The role of unpaid work is pivotal to Australia’s wellbeing, but equality also demands we cannot continue to rely on women shouldering lopsided responsibility for running a home and a job.
The reality is that women’s measured care hours have barely changed. Yet appreciation of the effort required to keep households running remains largely invisible. The e61 Institute research is a salient reminder that such unfair treatment towards more than half the population is shabby and downgrades their potential to boost the economy.
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