Outside the Home: The Role of Workplace and Industry Policies on Time spent on Unpaid Work

Women in Australia and globally undertake a larger share of household and care labour than their male counterparts. Understanding why these gendered patterns persist is important because gender inequality in unpaid housework and care has consequences for women’s ability to participate fully and effectively in public life and achieve equality more broadly. Gender inequalities at home create barriers to women’s employment and public participation, reinforce dominant ideologies about women’s and men’s unequal social roles, and limit men’s opportunities to participate fully in care activities.

We find that both workplace and industry level policies are influential in decreasing the time spent on unpaid work. In particular, work-family policies relating to parental leave and work flexibility appear to be most effective in reducing women’s housework hours and increasing men’s housework hours. But these policies work differently for care work. Instead, the availability of flexible work at workplaces is associated with more time on childcare hours among women, but not men. We also find an interactive effect between industry and workplace policies on flexible work for housework hours. Time spent on housework among women is smallest when an organisation offers job hours flexibility and there is a high level of flexibility at the industry level. Therefore, this shows that when organisations and industries align on their policies, they provide an even stronger effect on women’s domestic labour. In fact, we find that when both organisation and industries have flexible work strategies, women show the lowest housework hours and the gender gap is at its smallest. Therefore, flexible work arrangements are particularly powerful when workers are supported to work flexibly in both their workplaces and in their industries.

One takeaway from this is that our current policies both in workplaces and in industries are not doing enough to challenge the persistent gender gap in unpaid labour. To illustrate, we find no significant difference in industry level gender equality policies, specifically gender recruitment or gender promotion. While these policies are meant to increase equality in the workplace and industry through equal pay and promotion, this may be less effective for gender equality in unpaid work. Policies may need to be more directed to make real shifts in behaviours on unpaid work time.