Unpaid Work—What Does It Matter?

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• Author: Barbara Broadway
• Date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8462.12537

The Australian Economic Review, vol. 56, no. 4, pp. 500–501DOI: 10.1111/1467-8462.12537

Policy Forum: Unpaid Work—What Does It Matter?

Introduction

Barbara Broadway

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 andsocial

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 ex-

pensive 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, high-

lighting its wide‐rangingimpactsontheway

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‐oldsbutincreasesgreatlyatentry

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

comparativelylittlebyevensuchadrastic

change in external circumstances demon-

strates 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

*Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic and Social

Research, University of Melbourne, Level 5, FBE Bldg,

111 Barry St, Victoria 3010, Auatralia; email <b.

broadway@unimelb.edu.au>.

© 2023 The Authors. The Australian Economic Review publishedby John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of The University of

Melbourne, MelbourneInstitute: Applied Economic & Social Research, Faculty of Businessand Economics.

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