You’d be forgiven for not noticing the recent storm over data collection and gender. Authors writing in The Conversation claimed the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) was “gutting” the national time use survey (TUS), rendering it junk. The usually timid ABS took the extraordinary step of issuing a media statement clarifying “misconceptions” in the piece. The Conversation has remained quiet, updating the piece with a correction for one tiny aspect of the misrepresentations.
So what is the time use survey and why does it matter?
Tracking how individuals spend their days sounds like watching grass grow, but it’s a telling indicator of well-being.
Women do more unpaid work — housework, caring for children and volunteering — than men in Australia. This unpaid work is largely hidden and contributes to greater time poverty among women.
Taking stock of the time spent on both paid and unpaid work provides a broader indicator of economic contributions and helps advance principles of gender equity.
Taking stock of time
Consider what you’re doing now. You might be caring for children or waiting for the laundry cycle to finish while reading this. Perhaps you’re commuting to work.
How individuals spend their time matters for the nation’s bottom line and personal well-being.
Stocktakes of the way Australians spend time have been historically taken via the TUS, collected by the ABS over three time points — 1992, 1997 and 2006. It was killed off by the Labor government under Julia Gillard in order to achieve budget efficiencies.
Crude census questions on unpaid work were considered substitutes for the loss of TUS. But the data proved the census wasn’t the place for quality and accurate time-use data, and these items have since been flagged for removal.
Other notable national surveys include questions to examine time use and health outcomes, such as the household, income and labour dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey and longitudinal study of Australian children (LSAC).
While these collect insightful time-use data, they don’t have the scope or gender lens focus of the TUS.
Women’s groups fought for over a decade for the TUS resource to be reinstated. The women’s economic security statement under the Malcolm Turnbull Liberal government re-established funding for the national survey.
Then COVID-19 hit.
COVID-19 and the new world order
At the height of COVID-19 lockdowns and working from home, the TUS was fielded in 2020-21 after a 14-year hiatus. Collecting data during COVID-related health measures proved challenging for the ABS, but methodological insights and improved inclusivity emerged.
COVID resulted in rapid changes to time use. Many workers were working from home, working reduced hours, or not working due to workplace closures. They were stuck at home, often in cramped conditions. The juggle was made even more stressful for parents as they navigated classroom zooms and one-on-one instruction for their children.
Time-use data is invaluable for understanding the gendered impacts of the pandemic.
In the UK, the Office of National Statistics ramped up its COVID-era time use data collection with more frequent surveying, and the US survey of time use continued to be conducted annually.
Time is money
Analysis of how we spend our days reveals insights into things like “domestically useless” teens who are an untapped resource that could help ease time poverty among mothers. The men of Australia could also step up.
Women in paid work come home and do a “second shift” undertaking the bulk of cooking, cleaning and caring. “Women are bringing home the bacon and frying it up too“. The stubbornness of gender inequality says a lot about policy failure.
The highest priority of the reinvigorated TUS is to understand the full breadth of women’s economic activity. At the heart is unpaid caring — for children and adults. There will also be new questions on disability.
TUS is costly and tricky data to collect and analyse. It’s quite niche and requires an enormous time input from participants — imagine reporting your daily activities in 15-minute increments. Any improvements that can reduce burden and increase participation from the most time-poor Australians are welcomed.
Generational change
The ABS fielded the same TUS questions in 2020-21 as they did in 2006, to enable comparisons across years. The TUS questions first developed in 1992 didn’t fit the world we found ourselves in.
A generation of change occurred since the TUS questions were created. In the years to 2020-21, major technological change meant expectations of online surveying and a move away from paper forms.
Participants of the TUS pushed back against the outdated survey, on the grounds that it was too burdensome and the wad of papers too impractical
Data was adversely impacted.
Response rates were comparatively low for the 2020-21 TUS. The survey was too complex and had lost meaning, causing friction among those responding. Data was compromised in such a way that it cannot be released or reported on in the case of secondary activities. The core reasons for doing the survey — how people spend their time — were lost because respondents simply didn’t understand what they were being asked. For example, many failed to identify the common combination of working from home (primary activity) and providing care (secondary activity) because it wasn’t front of mind. Australians now juggle so many expectations that explicit prompts are needed to gauge the full use of time.
The ABS has since worked to develop a strengthened TUS for contemporary Australia with a digital-first strategy and language changes to accommodate a Year 7 reading and comprehension level. Explicit prompting will be added to capture primary and secondary activities and annual data collection will help track progress against gender equality reporting.
Online collection of TUS means data will be published within months rather than well over a year, as it was with paper forms. The timeliness of gender equity data means it can inform policy and advocacy in near real-time for maximum benefit.
The survey is ramping up, not being gutted, to build a more meaningful data collection for our time. As national efforts to make gender equality seem possible increase, the time is right to account for unpaid work more seriously in national economic statistics. Change in the TUS questions is necessary to facilitate this.
The ABS will hold the next TUS collection in July-September 2024. The ABS remains best placed to run the TUS because it’s able to require the participation of selected households, ensuring input from a diverse range of Australians.
If we’re serious about gender equality, then we must get serious about the data that highlights the gaps in our progress. Annual tracking means we can better hold governments to account to make real change.
Misrepresentation about something as vital as the TUS data collection could result in the vital resource being lost to the nation, undermining gender equity.
Spot on – I am in fact squeezing in 5 minutes to read Crikey while waiting for the laundry cycle to finish, before hanging the clothes out, doing a bit of early dinner prep and then getting an afternoon of work done before driving a kid to sports training and making dinner. My teenagers are not quite “domestically useless” but the linked article certainly nailed the way they “experience parental requests … as harassment”! I’m glad to hear the TUS is being ramped up. This data is critical to making unpaid work visible and reminding us to question entrenched patterns of behaviour.
Liz Allen was one of the regular commenters on The Drum and I miss her and the many other fellow citizens who shared their expertise in helpful, thoughtful and respectful comments.
Thanks Crikey for finding this researcher and publishing her work.
Unlike how the media prefers and platforms faux and/or RW nativist activists masquerading as ‘demographers’ to promote imported Anglo Christian nationalism and misogyny…
You only mention two genders?
Yes, it’s time we reinstated the word “sex”. There has been discussion about the way the ABS collects data, and the issue of asking about “sex” rather than “gender” one issue.
Sorry, but stay-at-home work – caring for kids, housework, cooking and so on – is not ‘unpaid work’ at all. If you’re in a domestic partnership, the point is that your spouse is likely earning, and so you are benefitting from the things that their income purchases that you would otherwise have to do paid work to obtain for yourself: housing, food, health care (either private, or through the Medicare rebate paid workers pay on their income – and which you don’t pay for, because you’re not earning money), holidays, toys, lifestyle stuff…in other words, you’re getting all the fiscal benefits that you’d otherwise need to be spending time in a paid job to get. Meanwhile, if you’re on a single parents’ pension (or fiscal transfers of some kind), then…well, you are, quite literally, getting paid for your ‘unpaid work’. By the taxpayer.
So…why are you getting paid for your ‘unpaid’ work? Because it’s only fair and right and just and proper and civically self-sustaining. It’s good policy. But also…why? Well, only because…ah, yes, first, second and third wave Feminism secured your legal, moral and fiscal entitlement to, and the civic normalisation of, said payments for your homemaking work. And it IS ‘payment’ that you are accruing. It is absolutely commonplace and (rightly) undisputed that if you are a homemaker, you do get paid. You DO accrue Superannuation – via your earning partner, to whose
individualdefacto joint Super you accrue legal entitlement. You DO accrue a stake in property ownership; again, via your legal entitlement to a fair portion of your(earning) partner’sshared property assets. You DO get paid for raising your children – via the legal entitlement to financial support any (earning) co-parent must contribute, and also via a significant number of child-related rebates and welfare transfers, which – again – are funded by income earners, and not you, even though you directly obtain the benefits of them, while the childless, non-home-making, fulltime earner pays proportionately the most for them.What is the matter with fourth wave Feminism? When did it become so grasping, so narcissistically focussed on privileged Knowledge Class professionals, and as a result, so disingenuously sly in benchmarking all notions of ‘equality’ against precisely the dismal metrics of a neoliberal economic structure that has, on balance, done much to re-imprison most newly-liberated women – and many men – in a kind of mocking cage of numerical reductionism. The debate as summarised in this piece reflects a resentful, technocratic view of family and home-making that leaves zero space for how human society works, why men and women get together to have kids in the first place, how they mutually solve the dynamic economic jigsaw puzzle that is the messy sweep of their lives, and – maybe most important of all – what it is that men and especially women who have kids actually would prefer to do when it comes to raising them. The debate comes perilously close to making having a family seem like some kind of patriarchal punishment. That might play to the Clem Ford audience, but the vast majority of mums I know adore having kids, happily trade off professional advancement for being with them, understand that good parenting is a team game in which one person is going to earn more of the cash than the other and the otehr is going to more of the drudge work, which also the fun work as often as not. It’s not a ‘gender competition’, in other words…something too many feminists now seem determined to make it.
I speak by the way as a five year stay-at-home homemaker veteran, who lived a very financially privileged lifestyle despite not having to do a single day’s paid work in that time, thanks to my high salary-earning co-parent, and – in turn – thanks to the material Feminist achievements of the last 100 years. Seriously, anyone who suggests that my five blissful years of hanging out with our son was ‘unpaid’ work should try opining that within earshot of my hard-working, high-achieving – now sadly ex – wife: she would probably have your throat out with her very capable teeth.
Homemaking work IS paid work. And if it’s really not in your case…then boy do you need to get a better lawyer.
Like many families, most of our disputes are around time-use. These can range from a raised eyebrow to full-on barnies.
One point that often comes up is the value of the task that time is being used on. For example, at the moment, I work fewer hours than my partner and so do the majority of the housework. As a result, it’s quite a different household with different priorities and hence effort going to different tasks.
I expect that, if examined at scale, these different priorities would show a clear gender skew too. It would be great to collect data on that as well.