Paying for housework: Resources, demand and attitudes

A number of recent studies have suggested that households in western countries are increasingly turning to paid household help to perform a range of domestic tasks formerly carried out by women at home. But while expenditure on meal services, in the form of eating out or buying take out food has undoubtedly increased in recent years, the percentage of households that employ paid help with routine everyday housework activities, such as cleaning, appears to be comparatively low in many western countries. In Australia our data indicate that only 19 per cent of couple households pay someone to do domestic work, and only 11 per cent of couple households employ paid help with routine house cleaning. In this paper we use data from the Negotiating the Life Course survey, 1997 to investigate why some households use paid help with domestic labour while others do not. We examine hypotheses relating to level of resources, level of demand and gender role attitudes. We also examine attitudes about whether paid domestic help is viewed as an efficient strategy for dealing with domestic tasks. We find that although resources, demand and gender role attitudes provide the parameters within which employing household help is made possible or desirable, beliefs about the effectiveness of this strategy are also very significant. The paper concludes that domestic outsourcing is doing little to relieve women's double burden of paid and unpaid work.

The effect of non-standard employment on work-family balance

Across the last four decades, the structure of the Australian labour market has changed profoundly as non-standard forms of employment have become more prevalent. According to many researchers, the growth of non-standard work has been driven by employee preferences, particularly among married women, for greater flexibility to balance paid work with domestic responsibilities and other non-work related pursuits. In contrast, other researchers argue that the increasing prevalence of non-standard employment reflects employer demands for greater staffing flexibility. From this perspective, non-standard forms of employment are considered to have a negative effect on work-family balance. This paper explores whether non-standard employment is associated with improved or poorer work-to-family conflict and tests whether experiences vary by gender. It concentrates on three common forms of non-standard employment: part-time employment, casual and fixed-term work contracts and flexible scheduling practices (such as evening work, weekend work and irregular rostering). Analysis is based on 2299 employed parents from the first wave of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics on Australia (HILDA) project. Results show that few scheduling measures are significant determinants of work-family balance. However, part-time employment is associated with reduced work-to-family strain for both men and women, even after controlling for various other employment and household related characteristics. Casual employment, in contrast, incurs the cost of poorer work-family balance for men. Surprisingly, HILDA data show that overall men experience greater work-to-family strain than women.