This International Women’s Day, Meg’s* life will feel no less chaotic than it does on any other day.

Like her husband, the 43-year-old from Sydney works five days a week – but she also has a second job, freelancing in the evenings. They have three young children, a mortgage and no family in Australia.

“I’m always whizzing around cleaning like a mad Tasmanian devil,” the creative director says. “As soon as you walk through the door, you see a thousand things that need to be done.

“Last night, my husband asked me if he had any clean boxer shorts – and the sad thing is, I’m the only one who knows the answer.”

She is not alone. The latest Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (Hilda) survey shows that in 2022, men spent an average of 12.8 hours a week on housework – exactly the same amount as they did 20 years earlier – while women do 50% more (an average of 18.4 hours).

In heterosexual couples with children under 15, men did one-third less housework, along with about half the childcare of their female partners. And, while women were spending less time on housework than they were in 2002, they were doing more hours of paid work and more unpaid care work.

All up, women had nearly two fewer hours a week for themselves than men – and they’re not OK with it.

Dr Inga Lass, the report’s co-author and senior research fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, found that women found the division of unpaid labour was unfair and were less satisfied with their share than men.

“I’ve got so used to doing housework on top of everything else that I’m just a well-oiled machine – that every now and then erupts into volcanic levels of resentment,” Meg says. “And then I get up and do it all over again.”

Gender norms persist

“This is not a surprise to me,” political economist Prof Elizabeth Hill says of the Hilda findings. She emphasises that, even when a woman was employed and her male partner was not, she still did most of the unpaid care.

Her own research with the University of Sydney reflects the very same finding: it is women’s lives that have bent to the modern demands of earning, procreating and housekeeping – not men’s.

“I don’t think there are many households where the parents are feeling that it’s particularly sustainable at this point in time,” says Georgie Dent, head of advocacy group The Parenthood.

There is another way of looking at the data however, says Peter Siminski of the University of Technology Sydney. We’re doing less housework overall (thanks to technology and outsourcing) and the figures reflect a positive – if slow – narrowing of gender gaps around housework.

Yet Siminski’s own research, again, mirrors Hilda: how much we can earn does not impact how work is divided at home.

Gender norms do, Lass suggests.

“I think it starts with how boys and girls are being raised, and what they’re being taught. There’s this hypothesis that women are often more judged if the house is a bit messy, while men are cut some slack.”

Even accounting for an increase in men’s housework because women have decreased theirs, “women end up doing more overall when you count together employment and housework and childcare.

“And this looks to me like women still feel compelled to get more done in the house,” she says.

As pervasive as our expectations – or those of our partners – is the structure of our labour markets, care systems, schools, workplace practices and policy settings, which, Hill says, presume that women are more interested in, and capable of, care and domestic labour than men.

(Stay-at-home dads – of which there were 80,000 in 2018, according to the Australian Institute of Family Studies – are welcome and important changes at the margins, but make little impact on the overall numbers, she says.)

Parenthood penalty

Australia and New Zealand is the third highest region for unpaid domestic work done by women, according to UN data from 2023.

Only in central and southern Asia, northern Africa and western Asia did women do more unpaid care and domestic work.

A 2024 report by the Australian Institute of Family Studies’ Dr Jenny Baxter showed that in 78% of couple families in Australia, the mental load was always or usually carried by the mother. Hill’s research found that the burden of care responsibilities fundamentally shaped women’s daily lives and capacity to work.

Some were resentful, others were resigned – most were exhausted.

The upshot is that both men and women miss out. There are known to be significant benefits for men who are involved in family care in terms of their health and wellbeing, says Hill.

But when they do try to mix work and care, research shows they can face an economic penalty and discrimination in training and promotion opportunities.

“We talk about the motherhood penalty – there seems to be the emergence of a kind of a parenthood penalty, and we need to push back against that really strongly,” she says. “It’s kind of unsurprising given that’s been women’s experience for decades.”

Work and home lives blurring

For Meg, there’s a sense of never getting ahead, even with more childcare. Lass suggests this is because of increasing expectations around raising children and their exposure to extracurricular activities.

We have more efficiency-boosting technology, but our smartphones blur the lines between work and family time while turbocharging stress and pressure, says Dent. In 2002, housework was not interrupted by the patter of school WhatsApp updates.

“It’s triage, making a mental hierarchy of everything,” Meg says of her constant domestic juggling. “And don’t get me started on sports – you’ve got to sign them up, jigsaw them into the right classes, sort out their kit: that’s the mental-load shit.”

Meg says her transformation from being an equal partner in her relationship began when she gave birth for the first time. It’s an observation that is borne out, verbatim, in the Hilda data. Up until having a baby, women do roughly the same share of housework and paid work as their male partners, then roles dramatically diverge.

“Having babies just shifts the dynamic [within] couples so much. It puts women on this invisible back foot. You’re at home all the time and that becomes your realm, so you start doing all the domestic chores,” she says.

Call for more flexible work

Get it right and get it right early, the data suggests. The birth of a first child is what sets a household’s patterns around care and housework. Hill says that in Nordic countries – where there is a significant investment in non-gendered parental leave – fathers who care for their infants continue to be involved closely in the care of their children in the subsequent years.

Dent says Australia has not reached the tipping point where extended paid parental leave meaningfully shifts how couples care for their children and run their households.

“In the countries where they have actually increased men’s participation in caregiving in a really meaningful sense, that has never happened by accident,” she says.

Alongside an acceleration in investment into paid parental leave and childcare systems, Australia needs more good flexible work – jobs that involve training and career opportunities.

“We’re heading in the right direction, but we need to go much faster, and we need to include all aspects of society,” says Hill.

Also, she says, “frankly, men need to step up”.

That’s true to Meg’s experience.

“I’m my own worst enemy because I don’t delegate –” Meg stops herself mid-sentence. “Or, is that just another thing I’m taking responsibility for?”

* Name has been changed