Unpaid Work—What Does It Matter?

When we think of economic activity, and even of work specifically, as economists we tend to overlook work that is not paid. And yet, looking after elderly family members, caring for and educating children, or preparing family dinners, are all essential services to our community and play an important role for individual wellbeing and health and social cohesion. As governments in many developing countries increasingly recognise—including the Australian Government with its recently developed Measuring What Matters Framework—national well-being goes beyond our financial situation and includes health, safety, sustainability and more. Many of those often-overlooked aspects of wellbeing are significantly supported by unpaid work.

One of the challenges for social scientists who are interested in unpaid work as an important input into our national wellbeing is the scarcity of available data. They are not included in administrative records and expensive to measure in surveys. There are two resources Australian researchers can rely on: first, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has recently published a new Time Use Survey (TUS 2020-21), a cross-sectional data set with detailed diary information form participants. And second, the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey includes a range of questions asking respondents about their activities in a typical week. Both are invaluable resources for researchers of unpaid work in Australia.

This issue of the Australian Economic Review devotes its Policy Forum to unpaid work. We present three articles that all use HILDA Survey data and tackle some of the many issues surrounding unpaid work, highlighting its wide-ranging impacts on the way we live. Considering the enormous amount of time we devote to this often overlooked part of our economy, many more questions necessarily remain, and may be explored in future fora. I hope some of our readers may be inspired to make use of Australia's time-use data—both the TUS and the HILDA survey—for further discoveries.

Janeen Baxter, Alice Campbell and Rennie Lee analyse trends in the gender patterns of unpaid labour over time and find that the gender gap in unpaid care work has remained almost unchanged in the last two decades, and any narrowing of the gap in housework is due to women performing less housework without men doing more. A gender gap in unpaid work is already present in 15-year-olds but increases greatly at entry into parenthood. They also find the impact of parenthood on the gender gap in unpaid work to be far greater than that of Victoria's COVID-19 lockdowns, which were among the strictest and longest in the world. That gendered work patterns were moved so comparatively little by even such a drastic change in external circumstances demonstrates the difficulty of changing pervasive norms and behaviours.

But what are the consequences of the gender gap in unpaid work? Nataliya Ilyushina takes a close look at the impact of housework on mental health. She finds that many different tasks are summarised under the term ‘housework’, and that those different tasks can have very different impacts on mental health. The more repetitive tasks that offer little control over schedule—such as errands—are detrimental for mental health while less repetitive tasks can be beneficial up to a certain point. The author points out the good news: the tasks that are most detrimental to mental health are also the ones that are easiest to outsource and automate, if families make smart use of digital technologies and services.

Kristin Snopkowski analyses the impact of unpaid work on family size. Specifically, she looks at whether an imbalance in unpaid work that is also perceived as unfair hinders couple families' progression to further births. She finds that this is not the case for one-child families, but families with two children are indeed less likely to have additional children if there is an unfair division of unpaid work. This is mostly mediated by a deterioration in relationship quality.

I hope you enjoy these insightful pieces.