According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, while workforce participation rates for women have been gradually increasing over the past few decades, this is not compensated for by a reduction of time spent working on unpaid work around the home. Women spend around the same amount of time on household work (which includes caring for children as well as domestic activities and shopping) today (an average of 33 hours and 45 minutes a week) as they did in 1992. Currently, men only spend 18 hours and 20 minutes a week. In other words, women do almost twice as much domestic labour as men and this varies little in relation to whether both spouses are engaged in full time work.
This imbalance persists between couples even where the primary earner in the household is the woman. Women often suffer discrimination even where there is no manifest work-life conflict, because some employers perceive that there could be conflict in the future and pre-empt or act accordingly. This can take many forms, from potential job assignments being withheld or reassigned to outright ‘redundancies’ and ‘restructuring’ being used as excuses to sideline working mothers. This campaign would focus on these statistics and partners equalising domestic labour to create a balance in the burden domestic labour plays in work life balance and work life conflict.