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(2006)Journal ArticleWomen are increasingly allocating time to the paid workforce, but there hasnot been a corresponding change by men allocating equivalent time to domestic and caring labour. In the absence of sufficient institutional and domestic support, women continue to supply the bulk of time required to care for children. This amounts to only half a sex revolution and raises the question of whether becoming a parent creates welfare differences between mothers and fathers, and/or between mothers and non-mothers. This article addresses this issue by analysing data from the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) Time Use Survey to investigate the impact of children on adults’ (paid and unpaid) workload. The results show that the time impact of becoming a parent is considerable, but very unevenly distributed by sex. Having children markedly intensifies gender inequities in time allocation by increasing specialization and women’s workload.
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(2006)Journal ArticleThis article uses diary data from the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey (N > 4,000) to compare by gender total child care time calculated in the measurements of (1) main activity, (2) main or secondary activity, and (3) total time spent in the company of children. It also offers an innovative gender comparison of relative time spent in (1) the activities that constitute child care, (2) child care as double activity, and (3) time with children in sole charge. These measures give a fuller picture of total time commitment to children and how men and women spend that time than has been available in previous time use analyses. The results indicate that compared to fathering, mothering involves not only more overall time commitment but more multitasking, more physical labor, a more rigid timetable, more time alone with children, and more overall responsibility for managing care. These gender differences in the quantity and nature of care apply even when women work full-time.
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(2006)Journal ArticleHow does parental education affect time in the paid workforce and time with children? Potentially, the effects are contradictory.An economic perspective suggests higher education means a pull to the market. Human capital theory predicts that, because higher education improves earning capacity, educated women face higher opportunity costs if they forego wages, so will allocate more time to market work and less to unpaid domestic labour. But education may also exercise a pull to the home. Attitudes to child rearing are subject to strong social norms, and parents with higher levels of education may be particularly receptive to the current social ideal of attentive, sustained and intensive nurturing. Using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time-use Survey 1997, this study offers a snapshot of how these contradictory pulls play out in daily life. It finds that inAustralia, households with university-educated parents spend more daily time with children than other households in physical care and in developmental activities. Sex inequality in care time persists, but fathers with university education do contribute more time to care of children, including time alone with them, than other fathers. Mothers with university education allocate more daily time than other mothers to both childcare and to paid work.
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(2007)Journal ArticleTime use studies find that employed mothers reduce their parental childcare time by much less than an hour for every hour they spend in market work. This paper uses data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey 1997 (4,059 randomly selected households) to investigate how employed mothers manage to avoid a one-for-one trade-off between work and childcare. It compares the time allocation of employed fathers, employed mothers and non-employed mothers and finds that parents use non-parental childcare to reschedule as well as to replace their own childcare, that employed mothers reschedule activities from weekdays to weekends or to earlier or later in the day, and spend less time than other mothers in housework, childfree leisure and personal care.
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(2008)Journal ArticleRaising children takes both time and money. Scholars have sought convincing ways to capture the costs of children, but even when these estimates include indirect costs, such as mothers’ foregone earnings, they fall short of the true time costs involved. This paper uses data from the 1997 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey to study how the allocation of time differs across households with varying numbers and ages of children and how households with children differ from those without children. It also examines the intra household division of time resources, showing how childcare, related unpaid work, and the total market and non-market workloads compare for a couple in the same household. It includes secondary activity in an analysis of total parental time commitments to give a more accurate picture of the time cost of children than is possible on the basis of analyzing ‘‘primary’’ activities alone.
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(2007)Journal ArticleThis paper draws on data from the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS) (over 4,000 randomly selected households) to tease out the dimensions of the ‘second shift’. Predictions that as women entered the paid workforce men would contribute more to household labour have largely failed to eventuate. This underpins the view that women are working a second shift because they are shouldering a dual burden of paid and unpaid work. However, time use research seems to show that when both paid and unpaid work is counted, male and female workloads are in total very similar. This has led to suggestions that a literal second shift is a myth; that it exists in the sense that women do more domestic work than men, but not in the sense that they work longer hours in total. Using a more accurate and telling measure of workload than previous research (paid and unpaid labour including multitasked activities), this paper explores the second shift and how it relates to family configuration, ethnicity and indicators of class and socioeconomic standing. It finds a clear disparity between the total workloads of mothers and fathers, much of which consists of simultaneous (secondary) activity, and some demographic differences in female (but not male) total workloads. It concludes that the view that the second shift is a myth is only sustainable by averaging social groups very broadly and by excluding multitasking from the measurement of total work activity.
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(2002)Journal ArticlePsychological adjustment in 90 women (30 carriers and 60 non-carriers) who had undergone genetic testing for mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 breast/ovarian cancer susceptibility genes was compared with that of 53 women who were not offered genetic testing. Women were assessed prior to genetic testing and 7–10 days, 4 and 12 months after carrier status disclosure using self-administered questionnaires. Compared with women not offered testing, mutation carriers had significantly higher breast cancer distress 7–10 days (t=2.80, P=0.005) and 12 months (t=2.01, P=0.045) post-notification. Non-carriers showed a significant decrease in state anxiety 7–10 days post-notification (t=2.27, P=0.024) and in depression 4 months post-notification (t=2.26, P=0.024), compared with women not offered testing. These data show that non-carriers derive psychological benefits from genetic testing. Women testing positive may anticipate a sustained increase in breast cancer distress following disclosure, although no other adverse psychological outcomes were observed in this group.
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(2008)ReportThis report analyses the 1997 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS) in order to investigate the ways in which Australians manage to balance the competing demands of work and family. It uses four measures, three relating to the ‘objective’ time pressure of the total hours worked (paid work, unpaid work and child care), and one measure of ‘subjective’ time pressure (feelings of being rushed or pressed for time). These measures are applied to six household types classified according to the arrangements each has made in relation to employment and child are: male-breadwinner family, one-and-a-half-earner family, (standard full-time) dual-career family (woman working standard full-time hours), (long hours full-time) dual-career family (woman working more than 49 hours a week), family in which the man does not work full-time, and sole mother family. The report investigates the differences between these household types, between men and women as individuals within households, and between sole mothers and married mothers. It also investigates the ways in which two key work-family policy measures – non-parental childcare and part-time work – currently affect work-family balance within Australian households.
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(2005)Journal ArticleHouseholds provide their members with both financial support and caring services. In sole parent households, the functions of earning money and caring for children fall to one individual. Current government policy favours work force participation as the solution to the higher poverty rates in lone parent families, but this may have a mirror effect on their ability to provide care. There is a great deal of research into the financial impacts of sole motherhood, but very little into the amount of time that sole parents' devote to care of their children, and what this means for their total (paid and unpaid) work commitments. In this paper I address this research gap. I analyse the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey 1997 (over 4000 randomly selected households), to compare sole and couple parents' overall time commitments to paid and unpaid work and to investigate whether time spent with children in lone parent and couple-headed families differs in type or quantity.