Economy would make a $1.5 billion jump, if men did more at home
Saturday, 15 May 2021
Women are doing more than their fair share of unpaid work at home, men are overestimating their own contribution, and it all adds up to a drag of $1.5 billion a year on the economy.
The $1.5b estimate from accountancy firm Deloitte is based on data from a nationwide survey of 2400 people paid for by Westpac, which suggested as few as 7 per cent of couples, where both worked full time, equally shared the housework.
Westpac chief executive David McLean urged the Government to learn from Scandinavian countries and tackle biases in national policy settings like parental leave laws, and urged businesses to adopt more flexible working arrangements.
But economist Marilyn Waring was not impressed by the quality of the survey data. “The few men who participated vis-a-vis women is an object lesson in itself. Not important enough for them to bother.”
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Crunching the numbers on the survey, in which just 37 per cent of those questioned were men, the survey found men estimated they did 43 per cent of the unpaid work at home, while women thought men did just 31 per cent of it.
Male respondents thought their partners did 11hours of care work per week, well below the 25 hours female respondents said they did on average, the survey found.
Waring said this finding was “hilarious, usual and internationally consistent” with research from overseas.
“Men underestimate how much unpaid work their partners do, which means all the rest of their answers are highly questionable because they are working from a fiction, not facts,” Waring said.
“Men also always overestimate how much unpaid work they do,” she said.
Men were also fiercely defensive of their leisure time, Waring said.
The survey indicated men wanted to do fractionally more work for the family, and fewer hours of paid work.
Women wanted the opposite, saying they would like to do less unpaid work, and more paid work.
Deloitte’s $1.5b economic boost came from “econometric” modelling based on the higher earner in a relationship doing 1.3 hours less of paid work, and picking up an extra 3.8 hours of unpaid work at home, while the lower earner would do 4.3 hours more of paid work each week, but reduce their unpaid work in the home by 3.8 hours.
Should such a rearrangement happen nationally, it would mean a net increase in the amount of work couples would typically do in a week.
Such a shift would help close the gender pay gap, said McLean.
The $1.5b figure, which assumes the labour market would reorganise to meet workers’ preferences, was designed to start a conversation, he said.
“You have to put a number on it to get people’s attention,” he said.
The survey indicated real-world trade-offs couples made that led to the unequal division of paid and unpaid labour.
Barriers to an “ideal time division” included couples making choices that maximised household income (34 per cent), were the result of the prohibitive cost of childcare (24 per cent), or simply where one partner refused to do their fair share of work in the home (18 per cent).
Waring said women tended to carry what’s called the “cognitive load” of households, taking responsibility for forward planning, children’s healthcare and education, balancing the household budget, and other stressful planning tasks.
The report treated all work in the home put an equal stress on the person doing it, Waring said.
Men also tended to favour work that involved fun things like power tools, she said.
McLean acknowledged Waring’s criticism, saying his wife would ask him: “Why is the vacuum not seen as a power tool?”
Waring has campaigned to get New Zealand to restart its “time-use” survey, which tracked how people spent their time, until it was ended in a decision she saw as symbolic of society undervaluing women’s contribution.
McLean said the Government needed the data the time-use survey provided to make good policy decisions.
“It’s a bit like running a business. If you don’t have the numbers, you can’t do it,” he said.
McLean hoped businesses would think about enabling both their male and female employees to take on their fair share of work at home.
The most important things they could enable, according to the people surveyed, was to allow more work to be done from home (44 per cent), and to bring in flexible working arrangements (42 per cent).
McLean said: “It’s the Scandinavian countries that are leading the way in flexible working models and encouraging an equal split of parental and domestic responsibilities.”
“In Sweden, mothers and fathers have a portion of leave they can share with their partner as they like and another quota that they need to use themselves or lose.”
During the Covid-19 alert level 4 lockdown in 2020 men reported doing more unpaid work around home.
“The Covid-19 lockdowns opened our eyes to what sharing the load means for every one of us,” McLean said.
“For families they were particularly disruptive, but they also provided the blueprint for change.”
Poorer women tended to do a greater share of work at home than wealthier ones, the survey found. Higher income couples were twice as likely as lower-income couples to share the load at home equally, it found.
Kendall Flutey, 30, chief executive of Banqer, a financial education in schools technology company, said her generation was sharing the work more evenly at home.
“It’s quite fluid for my generation. There’s no expectation to conform, which I quite like,” she said.
She and her partner split the work at home evenly. As he was a great chef, he did most in the kitchen, she said.
The survey found most couples across all age brackets did not share the load equally.