Abstract
This paper draws on data from the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS) (over 4,000 randomly selected households) to tease out the dimensions of the ‘second shift’. Predictions that as women entered the paid workforce men would contribute more to household labour have largely failed to eventuate. This underpins the view that women are working a second shift because they are shouldering a dual burden of paid and unpaid work. However, time use research seems to show that when both paid and unpaid work is counted, male and female workloads are in total very similar. This has led to suggestions that a literal second shift is a myth; that it exists in the sense that women do more domestic work than men, but not in the sense that they work longer hours in total. Using a more accurate and telling measure of workload than previous research (paid and unpaid labour including multitasked activities), this paper explores the second shift and how it relates to family configuration, ethnicity and indicators of class and socioeconomic standing. It finds a clear disparity between the total workloads of mothers and fathers, much of which consists of simultaneous (secondary) activity, and some demographic differences in female (but not male) total workloads. It concludes that the view that the second shift is a myth is only sustainable by averaging social groups very broadly and by excluding multitasking from the measurement of total work activity.
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Notes
Paid work: employment-related and education activities – main job; other job; unpaid work in family business or farm; work breaks; job search; attendance at educational courses; job-related training; homework/study/research; breaks at place of education; communication and travel associated with these activities. Domestic labour: housework; food or drink preparation and meal clean-up; laundry, ironing and clothes care; tidying, dusting, scrubbing and vacuuming; paying bills and household management; lawn, yard pool and pet care; home maintenance and pet care; shopping for goods and services; communication and travel associated with these activities. Childcare: teaching, helping children learn, reading, telling stories, playing games, listening to children, talking with and reprimanding children; feeding, bathing, dressing, putting children to sleep, carrying, holding, cuddling, hugging, soothing, are all examples of physical childcare; journeys and communications associated with childcare activities; supervising games and recreational activities such as swimming, being an adult presence for children to turn to, maintaining a safe environment, monitoring children playing outside the home, keeping an eye on sleeping children.
Analyses, including tests for multicolinearity, were conducted using SPSS version 14.
Recall that variables that include both weekend and weekday time, and weekly hours are calculated by multiplying daily total work by seven. Only the work activities outlined are counted: secondary activities such as listening to the radio are excluded. Time when the secondary activity was childcare, but the primary activity was sleeping is excluded. Episodes in which the same activity was recorded as both a primary and a secondary activity are counted once only.
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Acknowledgements
This material was produced with the assistance of the Office for Women, Australian Federal Department of Family and Community Services through the Time Use Research Fellowship Scheme. The views expressed in this paper are the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Office For Women or the Australian Government.
Appendix A
Appendix A
Tables A.1 and A.2
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Craig, L. is there really a second shift, and if so, who does it? a time-diary investigation. Fem Rev 86, 149–170 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400339
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400339