Already and this this is the Daily Lost, This is the Daily ohs oh, now it makes sense. Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Monday, the tenth of March.
I'm Billy, I'm Sam.
Today we are looking at the latest results from an annual study that looks at how households are changing over the years. So last week the latest survey, known as the Household Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia also known as HILDA, was released and it captures trends across a broad cross section of Australian's finances, social life, mental health,
household activities and family life. Now, among its findings, Sam, I thought you'd like this was that men are doing the same amount of housework on average as they were twenty years ago.
I'm doing more because I was ten twenty years ago, defying the odds.
So today we are dissecting the findings and discussing what has and hasn't changed about Australian households in recent decades.
This is a story that really generated a lot of discussion last week when we were reporting it. I want to go through with you what the survey actually found and dive a bit deeper into some of those statistics, but give me more of a sense of what this survey actually is and why it's there. Yeah.
So it started in two thousand and one and it's been done every single year since then, and it's funded by the Australian Government, but it's conducted by the University of Melbourne and now it is nationally representative, which is kind of one of those jargon words that you hear a lot about in surveys, and it just means that it is a way for researchers to get an accurate sample of the entire population of Australia without actually needing to interview every single person in the country.
Makes sense. Most surveys are like that.
Yeah, so you know, I presume that Sam, you weren't asked.
I was not part of the hilticipate.
In this survey. But it's still nationally representative because of the sample of Australians they have selected for this. Now they interview seventeen thousand people and it speaks to all different types of households. So households with two parents and kids are the most common, then followed by households with just one couple and no kids, and then single parents, and obviously there are many other different types of households
that are included in this. One of the really interesting things that I find about the study is that it actually interviews the exact same people every single year, right.
Interesting, So it's the same group of seventeen thousand almost being tracked through life, exactly.
And so for nearly twenty five years, the same households have been interviewed on mostly the same topics. They do kind of introduce new topics every now and again, So in twenty eighteen they started to ask people about pet ownership, right, But there are consistent topics that they do ask every single year, and they say that the idea of that is that the study can in theory, go on indefinitely.
It can go on forever because they won't just interview their initial sample members, but then also their kids and their grandkids. And so it's kind of one of those things that we could be talking about this, not you and I, Sam, but people could be talking about this hundred year yeah exactly.
But it's also why they can then get some of those really interesting findings about social change. Yes, and then controlling the same group of people means that we can come out with findings that are, you know, what has changed in twenty years and say it with a lot of confidence.
Exactly.
Okay, So we have this study that has, you know, this annual tracking of how these seventeen thousand Australians and nationally representative sample are behaving. And I think the biggest thing that's come through, at least on tda's social channels is the findings on housework. So let's talk about that first.
Yeah, it was the focus when it came out last week. So, as I mentioned at the top, you found that men are doing the same amount of housework on average as they were twenty years ago. So this is things like cleaning and cooking, and so men are doing roughly thirteen hours of housework every week, while women are doing about eighteen and a half hours, although that has actually decreased since two thousand and two, the number of hours that
women are spending on housework. So women were doing about twenty four hours of housework in two thousand and two, now they're doing about eighteen and a half hours. But that just means that I guess less housework is now being done. I was about to say men are not doing more.
Men aren't feeling the void than that just means that, you know, the dishes are a bit.
Dirtier and the sink exactly. And single dads, I think this is not surprising. They did the most housework of any men, with seventeen point four hours weekly.
Has anything changed with men over twenty year period?
Some things have changed, that good question. So one thing that has changed for men is how many hours they spend caring for their children and disabled or elderly relatives, although it's only gone up by a little bit. So in two thousand and two there were five hours spent on caring duties by men and now there's five and a half hours spent on it, so a little increase there.
One of my favorite stats from the survey is they also looked at the satisfaction levels in terms of the division of housework in households, and it found that men are quite satisfied with the division of unpaid work between the women and men in their household, but women less satisfied. Are you following? Does that make sense?
Okay, I'm following, yep. So some interesting kind of attitude angles to this.
Yes, So men satisfied with the division of labor where they are doing less housework than the women. Women less satisfied they would like the men to be doing a little bit more housework. They also asked the couples whether they think that they are individually doing their fair share, and it found that men majority of men do believe that they are doing the fair share of housework, whereas most women believe that they are doing significantly more than their fair.
Share, which is surprising to consider. There's that, I don't know what you'd call it an expectations gap or a kind of a setting and meeting expectations gap. Because of the progress in this conversation and the evolution over the last two decades, you would think that that would have translated in this sort of survey into a more tangible way.
Yeah, that's what I think is the conversation that obviously, over the past two decades we have been talking about the division of labor so much, and you know, women being more involved in the workplace than they were fifty years ago. But clearly, even though women are more involved in the workforce and they were two decades ago and also fifty years ago, they are still doing the majority of the housework. So that is kind of one area where I guess society is still lagging in terms of equality.
I'd be really interested. And I don't know if we have this answer on hand, and maybe we can come back and tell the listeners what we find later. But whether there's an attitude shift with younger men and whether we're seeing kind of I don't know men between eighteen and thirty exhibit a more hours of contribution to a household, but be that expectation question, whether there's a sort of generational shift.
Well, you can be our sample size of one. Are you doing more housework, Sam than.
I was twenty years ago? Absolutely? I know.
Are you doing more than your wife? No?
Absolutely not, I was going to say, but probably if I was to be asked whether I thought I was doing enough, it would be a big, fat no. So I think that that I would hope that that salvages my reputation slightly, is that it sounds like I'm a bit more in touch than the general male population in terms of expectations on me, and I know I'm falling very well short of that.
I think Monty, which is Sam's wife's name, I think that we cut this up, send it to her and she can forever know that we have on camera you saying that you're.
Not doing enough. I do love her very much.
Okay. My partner is actually the opposite. He does one hundred percent of the cooking. So these findings aren't quite representative for me.
And if we did the findings on what it was like here in the TDA office, then I think it would be recognized that I clean your desk. Your desk is single handedly bringing down the cleanliness qualities of this workplace.
That is also true. But back to the survey, let's stick to it.
What did it find about families.
So specifically on single parent families, it found that they are struggling the most and that they have been hit hardest with the rising cost of living, particularly in recent years. So single parents have seen a seventy six percent increase in childcare costs per child per week, and that's different to families with two parents, they've seen about a fifty percent increase.
And we can expect that that's the play a role in the election that we've got coming up. On a federal level, childcare policies always part of the equation in a federal context, but there was also a finding that I found really interesting. About one in four single parent families live in poverty. Yeah, and I thought that was quite a shocking stat for a country where we the image of Australia that we like to project and think about is not one where you've got twenty five percent
of single parent families living below the poverty line. Let's now turn to one other group before we wrap up today, and I want to talk about young people. What are the specific trends that you think are important in terms of Australia's youth.
Yeah. I think the biggest thing that stood out to me about young people in this report is the prevalence of loneliness. Right, So, Hilda found that loneliness is particularly prevalent among young people aged between fifteen and twenty four, and that share of lonely individuals between that age group specifically was increasing for about a decade before twenty twenty, but then it co completely accelerated once a pandemic did hit.
So in twenty twenty, about one in four young people said that they were lonely and that has stayed at similar levels in the years since.
Despite the fact that there's not those physical barriers of being able to you know, we can go out of it exactly if we want.
Yeah. So we saw this exponential increase in the number of young people feeling lonely during the pandemic and it has stayed there despite like you were just saying, those restrictions that came in during the pandemic lifting. Interestingly, just staying on loneliness, is said that none of the other age groups saw a similar increase in loneliness prevalence, So it was only in young people that we saw that, and actually older adults even saw a decrease in the share of lonely people.
And that's part of a global trend as well. I mean, we've covered loneliness studies that have been US based and the warning from the US Surgeon General that loneliness is the kind of epidemic of our time, particularly for younger populations, and Australia is clearly not exempt from that.
Yeah. Also, just quickly, in terms of a gender divide, it found that females are more likely to become lonely than males.
I think there's a lot of work to be done in this loneliness space, and there are new projects from almost every university in Australia around loneliness the psychology of loneliness. But I think this highlights that clearly there are things that we're still trying to figure out an answer around how to prevent it and help people move through it.
We often talk about the loneliness epidemic, particularly among young people, and I can never talk about it without mentioning Eleanor Oliphant, which is my favorite book of all time. Are you familiar with it, Sam, No, Oh, It's called Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine, and it follows the story of a woman who experiences severe loneliness. And it's just a beautiful, beautiful book, and it really provides it's fiction, but it provides really captivating insights into the mindset of an extremely
lonely person. It's a beautiful book. You'll cry and love all in one sentence. It's just beautiful.
I don't know if I've got time to read with all of my increased housework, due to make sure that when we sit here this time next year, I can say very firmly that I've lifted my game. Billy, thank you so much for taking us through those findings. They're fascinating and gives us an interesting snapshot into the state of Australia and thank you for joining us on the Daily Ods this morning. If you feel like you haven't done quite enough housework, I've got the way to make
you feel better. You can follow, like or subscribe this podcast watch the logic there. Not quite sure, I'll have to tell you next time, but it does help independent media. And you know, if we can make one of us in this conversation feel better, then you don't feel that good about the housework. We feel good about growing our little company. So thank you so much for joining us. They We'll be back in the afternoon with your headlines.
Have a good one. My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Aranda Bunjelung calcottin Woman Country.
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