Birth rates are falling throughout the western world. There is no definitive answer as to why this is so. This paper investigates whether time use analysis could offer a useful perspective. It explores the way parenthood affects time allocation in four countries with different work-family...

Measures of childcare drawn from time-diary data are commonly based on the specific childcare activities a parent engages in throughout the day. This emphasis on activities has been criticised as it ignores the large quantity of time parents spend supervising their children. In order to provide...

Is gender inequality in unpaid work within households implicated in falling fertility rates? This paper investigates whether the likelihood couples with one child will have more children is affected by: (i) the amount of household labor they each perform or (ii) the way they divide household...

Time use studies find that employed mothers reduce their parental childcare time by much less than an hour for every hour they spend in market work. This paper uses data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey 1997 (4,059 randomly selected households) to investigate how employed...

Parents who undertake paid work are obliged to spend time away from their children, and to use nonparental childcare. This has given rise to concern that children are missing out on parental attention. However, time-use studies have consistently shown that parents who are in paid employment do...

This article explores how having children impacted upon (a) paid work, domestic work and childcare (total workload) and (b) the gender division of labour in Australia over a 15-year period during which government changed from the progressive Labor Party to the socially conservative...

Raising children takes both time and money. Scholars have sought convincing ways to capture the costs of children, but even when these estimates include indirect costs, such as mothers' foregone earnings, they fall short of the true time costs involved. This paper uses data from the 1997...

Young adults are now more likely to co-reside with their parents than previous generations, but domestic work patterns among this family type are largely unexplored. This study addresses this issue using Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Surveys (1992, 1997, 2006) and Poisson–Gamma...

Does being self-employed, as opposed to being an employee, make a difference to how parents with young children can balance work and family demands? Does self-employment facilitate more equal gender divisions of labour? This article uses the Australian Time Use Survey to identify associations...

Purpose: Being successful in a rapidly changing world of work depends upon having very clear insights into the nature of the workforce from top leadership to lowest employee levels. Understanding generational similarities and differences provides a good starting point, as it provides the basis...