The Wife Drought

by Annabel Crabb

  In the workplace, this microbial pattern of behaviour translates into something much broader. Being a husband and father carries an undeniable cachet; there’s the corroborative fact of having been chosen and valued by someone, of course, but also there’s an additional, whispered assurance; chances are this person will be able to hang about till stumps without any fuss about having to get to child care. The assumption – so richly and overtly present in the parliamentary debates of 1922 – that a woman’s first priority is the home is still a strong subterranean influence today.

  Are attitudes changing? One would assume so; barely a day can go by without some new story about a male CEO who is ‘taking on’ gender imbalances in his company, or some flexible work initiative that is going to make all the difference. But the truth is that attitudes – at least on the question of who is expected to do what in an average family – aren’t changing the way you might expect them to.

  Have a look at the results when Australians are asked if they agree or disagree with the statement: ‘It is better for the family if the husband is the principal breadwinner outside the home and the wife has primary responsibility for the home and children.’

  In 1986, just over 55 per cent of men agreed with that proposition. That proportion swan-dived down to about 30 per cent by 2001, but by 2005, it had gone up again, to 41.4 per cent. Women subscribe to that view less enthusiastically than men on the whole, but they too have waxed and waned over the last 30 years. In 1986, 33 per cent of them thought it was better for men to work and women to keep house. By 2001, that had dipped to 19 per cent. But by 2005, it had bobbed back up to 36.4 per cent.17

  What’s happening? It’s one thing to muse indulgently on the antiquated day of the wife ban, and its outdated assumptions about the role of men and women. It’s another entirely to be executing some sort of national handbrake-turn and heading right on back there. My own suspicion is that while women’s shift into work has been considerable, the lack of a corresponding shift the other way by men means that combining work and family, for women, is harder than it should be. It’s hard, too, for men who want to be better fathers than their dads were. Is it any wonder that the old models might gently re-assert themselves as the easiest and least stressful solution?

  Merle Thornton, reflecting on a life lived among the cordite whiff of the gender war’s frontline, has this to say: ‘The things that have changed have changed faster than anything in human history. But in the end, it comes down to personal relationships between men and women. And a lot of that still has a long way to go.’

  The truth is that workplaces don’t function in a vacuum, even though we often pretend that they do. And for all the combing of offices and workshops and factories and hospitals and schools and farms and shops for patterns to tell us how men and women work, they only make sense when we take a step closer, and check out what men and women do when they’re at home.

  4

  MEANWHILE, ON THE HOME FRONT

  The average Australian is a 37-year-old woman. She was born in Australia, of Australian parents, and has Anglo-Celtic ancestry. When at home with her husband and her two children – a boy and a girl aged nine and six – the Average Australian speaks only English. The house she lives in is located in a suburb of a capital city; it has three bedrooms, and a mortgage on which the Average Australian and her husband pay $1800 a month. They have lived in that house for more than five years, and every day the Average Australian drives in one of the family’s two cars to her job as a sales assistant, a job in which she works thirty-two hours a week. She has a certificate in Business and Management, but the Average Australian finds the flexible hours in retail suit her perfectly well, because she needs to juggle things with the kids.

  This portrait was issued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics after Census 2011.1 The Average Australian is the proton-pellet of information excreted by the nation’s premier statisticians after digesting the lives, habits, family structures, religious beliefs, income, education and lives of 22 million people, as they stood on the evening of 9 August 2011. To assemble this Identikit Australian, the ABS simply grafted the most common gender (female, since 1979) on to the most common occupation for that gender (sales assistant), and plonked her in the most common relationship, with the most common number of kids and so forth.

  The Average Australian changes every Census, as the population grows, diversifies, and in other ways evolves into a pattern we could not have imagined a generation earlier; in 1911, for example, the Average Australian was a 24-year-old Anglican farmer. By 1961, he was a 29-year-old clerk.

  But here’s the funny thing about averages. It’s not that they don’t represent everyone; we all understand that. The fascinating thing is that, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, they don’t actually represent anyone: ‘While many people will share a number of characteristics in common with this “average” Australian, out of the nearly 20 million people counted in Australia on Census night … no single person met all these criteria,’ announces the Bureau, with enviable bureaucratic poise, in its 2013 edition of Australian Social Trends.2

  Ah, statistics. So useful, so fascinating, and yet so full of holes. Statistics give us the degree of likelihood that something will happen to us; the evanescent, predictive shape to our human endeavours. But the holes are our audacious expression of hope, our teensy-weensy human yelp of exceptionalism; our faith in our own autonomy, our originality, our capacity to be the pack-a-day smoker who doesn’t get cancer, or to back the long-odds horse that comes home in a canter.

  Right up close, we all look different; we all have a chance of bucking the system. To ourselves, we look utterly unique. It’s only when viewed from space – or from a Canberra eyrie atop a tottering stack of Census papers – that the patterns become dully apparent.

  So when we consider how things go down in the average home, and what happens when human organisms shack up together, we must thus remember, first of all, that to individuals and the people they love there is no such thing as average. The averageness is only apparent in hindsight, or in long-sight, or when a million such individuals are fed into vast, peristaltic information-munching machines, the results pooped out in a tidy string of statistical luncheon-meat.

  We have looked at what happens at work when couples get together and have children. But what happens at home when men and women A) fall in love, B) move in together, C) get married, and D) have children? I have mentioned these events, ABS-style, in the chronological order that our modern age currently registers as the commonest, but of course some couples do things in a different way. Some of them do A first, then C, then D. Some do A, then B, then D. Some just leave it at A, or A then B, or A then C. It’s even possible – although, if Woody Allen and Mia Farrow are anything to go by, not always entirely successful – to do A and D, and skip everything in between.

  By hook or by crook, though, a vast number of Australians still wind up living in houses that have a dad, a mum, and a certain number of children. Who does what in those houses?

  Let’s take the visible-from-space view first, which delivers the least-surprising bulletin internationally available on this topic: women do more work in the home than men. This is true everywhere, although the phenomenon has different extremes in different countries. The country in which a randomly chosen female spouse has the best chance of a hand with the washing-up is Norway, where – according to the OECD – blokes put in three hours of domestic work a day, as opposed to their wives who rack up three and a half.3 Norway, incidentally, has one of the world’s most generous paternity leave schemes.

  And then you get countries like Japan, where the average man does just an hour of chores, cleaning, child care and so on, but finds that home ticks along okay because his wife does five hours.

  Australian women do an unusually high amount of housework and child care: five hours and eleven minutes a day, which is eleven minutes more than the Japanese lady we were feeling sorry for in the last paragraph. But o
n the bright side, Mrs Australia isn’t married to Mr Japan: she’s married to Mr Australia instead, and he does nearly three hours’ work a day in the home – lots less than his wife, sure, but lots more than his brothers in Mexico, Korea or Italy.

  One of the reasons that Australian men and women do more work in the home than their international counterparts is that we do not have a culture of low-paid domestic service. In the United States, for instance, both men and women do less housework than we do, but they are also much more likely to have a representative of a social underclass helping out. Domestic workers in the US are 94 per cent women anyway, so it doesn’t mess with the gender statistics too much, but outsourcing housework brings in a whole lot of other variables, specifically race; domestic carers who are white, for instance, earn a median wage of $12 an hour, while black and Latino workers earn $10, and Asians $8.33, according to research done in 2012 by the National Domestic Workers Alliance.4

  On one hand, it’s nice to see the American ladies getting cut some slack in the domestic department. On the other, it’s pretty awful that that slack gets taken up by workers whose pay-rate depends at least in part on the colour of their skin.

  Women do more housework than men do. This is the big picture, everywhere. Across all the countries of the OECD, men average 141 minutes a day of work in the home, and women average 273 – twice as much, basically.5 This is not a regionalised statistic. It’s a global one. I’m not trying to get you down. The truth is that no matter how fast things change outside the home, things inside the home don’t change that fast.

  In order to zoom in and have a closer look at the local situation, I’m now going to introduce you to one of the greatest things the Australian Government has done for nerds in the last thirty years. It’s called the Time Use Survey, and it’s carried out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on a broad cross-section of Australian households, asking men and women to fill out detailed diaries recording how they spend their time.

  The Time Use Survey is a fabulously nosy affair. It tracks what people do right down to the last minute, and keeps track of when they do two things at once. It is much more reliable than an ordinary survey, which is when householders are asked to estimate the amount of time they spend on various activities. This is because when human beings are asked on the phone to estimate how much housework they do, they exaggerate.

  A national diary study carried out in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century, for instance, found that everybody was pretending to do more housework than they actually did. Men claimed to be doing twenty-three hours of housework a week, when the diaries revealed they were really only doing ten. And women estimated they were doing thirty-two hours, but actually it turned out to be more like seventeen.6

  Intellectually, this makes sense. If someone from the Australian Bureau of Statistics rings you when you just happen to be skiving off work and binge-watching Game of Thrones while the children amuse themselves with online gambling, then of course you’re going to claim you are currently supervising maths homework, especially if you have any suspicion at all that your spouse is going to hear about this. People lie to surveys all the time. It’s why the One Nation vote was always a bit higher than polls detected. It’s why, despite everybody always saying when surveyed that they would be prepared to pay higher taxes in return for more spending on health and education, they usually vote the other way.

  The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Time Use Surveys, which they conducted in 1992, 1997 and 2006, have been described by the US National Academy of Sciences as ‘the Mercedes of time-use surveys’.7 They are spectacularly detailed. The information that is winkled out in these diaries is a source of deep geek-joy, obviously, but it’s much more than that. It gives us the only really reliable national estimate of work in the home, given that we don’t account for that work in any of the other established ways, of which ‘paying for it’ would be the first to mind.

  The tragic news, however, is that the study planned for 2013 was cancelled due to budget cuts the Bureau was obliged to make by the Gillard Government.8 It’s now not scheduled again until 2019, which means I will be using data from 2006, so if you’ve significantly picked up your game on housework in the past eight years and you feel it’s been overlooked, you should go ahead and raise it with your local MP.

  In the years between 1992 and 2006, quite a bit changed in Australian society. Significant economic reform took place. And the employment patterns of Australian women, of whom, in 1992, only 48 per cent were in some kind of paid work, changed too: by 2006, more than half of Australia’s women – 55 per cent – were in the workforce.9

  This movement of women into the workplace was considerable, but it was not counterbalanced by men moving in the opposite direction. And women did not decrease their overall contribution to housework to reflect the other jobs they’d taken on since 1992. In fact, between 1992 and 2006, women actually increased the time they spent on child care by nearly 20 per cent.10

  Defenders of the traditional breadwinner/homemaker model argue that the lopsided distribution of paid and unpaid work within a couple makes economic sense. This is the system called ‘exchange bargaining’, in which one person – commonly the husband – earns money and supports another person – usually the wife – who in return agrees to take responsibility for bathroom grout and the Easter Bonnet Parade, and all the rest of it. There certainly are appealing aspects to this arrangement: no one is doubling up on tasks too much, and there is a fairly clear rule of thumb as to who does what.

  And it’s true that if you add up the total number of hours that everybody’s worked, including all paid and unpaid work, the total number of hours done by men and women in couple families tends to be about the same. In the traditional family structure, he will take care of earning the income, plus lawnmowing, plus the removal of certain crawling pests, and it will add up to about the same amount of time as she is spending on cooking, cleaning, and child care.

  What’s really interesting, though, is what happens in those families when circumstances change. What happens when women move into paid work, and men move out of it? If the exchange bargaining model is to be believed, everybody should swap around tasks so that things stay roughly even, right?

  But that’s not what happens. According to the Australian Time Use Survey data, men on average do between fifteen and twenty hours of housework a week, no matter whether they work full-time, part-time or not at all. Men who are not in the labour force at all do about twenty hours of housework. Part-time working men do about fifteen hours, and full-time working men do sixteen.11 Why do men working full-time do slightly more housework than men working part-time? I do not know.

  Women, however, are an entirely different story. Women will do more housework if they are not employed, and drop it back as they take on more hours of paid work. There’s a much greater range; on average, an Australian woman does forty-two hours of housework a week (excluding child care) if she doesn’t have a paid job, but only twenty-five hours of housework if she works full-time. Still more than the average man – even the one who doesn’t do any paid work at all.12

  Keep in mind, these are averages. If you are a home dad, reading this in a quick break between taekwondo training, ironing, and the preparation of a healthy after-school snack of crudités, please do not cuss me out. Obviously, many men do more housework than twenty hours. But the statistics make it pretty clear: women do more housework than men, by quite a long straw, no matter how many hours of paid work they do.

  While women’s housework hours depend strongly on what else is going on in her life, there are only a handful of life events that change the amount of housework that men do, to a significant and broadly observed degree.

  Moving out of home is one of them. A man aged between twenty and forty-nine who moves out of his parents’ home to live either alone or in a share household dramatically increases the time he spends cooking and shopping.13

  Another is divorce. Accordin
g to Janeen Baxter, a leading academic in this field, who analysed data from a survey project of several thousand Australians called Negotiating the Lifecourse, divorce immediately adds about ten hours a week to a man’s domestic workload. Divorce means something quite different for women, who do about six hours less a week after divorcing their husbands.14

  What about the arrival of children? Surely all that extra washing, sterilising, shopping for magic swaddle suits that do not work and so on must make a difference to the domestic workload?

  Baxter’s research found that the birth of a first child jacked up a woman’s housework considerably; she did about half as much again after that child’s birth, and more again after the birth of a second child.15

  The birth of a first child, however, generates negligible extra housework for men. And the arrival of a further child after that actually reduces the amount of time the supplier of its Y chromosome spends doing housework. Baxter, puzzled, advances two theories: ‘It may be that additional children help to cement an already traditional division of labour in many households. Or it may be that additional children lead men to increase their hours of paid work in order to compensate for the increased expenditure associated with more children, or to compensate for their wives’ reduced time in paid labour.’16

  So women shrink their housework hours when they work full-time and increase them when they have children – they respond rather elastically, in other words, to all the changes life can bring. But men seem to be bound by some kind of unwritten national housework award which keeps them at about twenty hours a week, no matter what else is going on.

  There is another factor that has an intriguing effect on the division of labour in the Australian home, and that’s share of earnings. The historical male-breadwinner model assumes that men will earn all of the household income and that women will do most or all of the housework.