This article examines the organization of childcare between generations and genders in Australian families where parents and grandparents participate in childcare. The rise in maternal labour market participation and dual-earner families has generated demand for grandparental childcare. Grandmothers provide most of this childcare, but little is known about intergenerational arrangements concerning paid work and childcare. These practices are analysed from interviews with 69 parents and grandparents in Australia. The analysis highlights predominant gendered practices of distributing care between women across generations and relegating men to secondary or tertiary roles based on legitimate excuses applied to fathers and grandfathers. Mothers tend to adjust their employment around childcare, relying heavily on grandmothers, while fathers' involvement remains limited due to their 'fixed' work commitments. While grandmothers generally are seen as the 'natural' alternative to maternal care, grandfathers are excused from childcare on grounds that include and expand beyond fathers' legitimate excuse of work commitments. The finding that a small number of grandfathers participated in caregiving to the same extent as grandmothers or provided childcare independently calls for further research into contexts and policies conducive to such involvement. We conclude that childcare is a negotiated intergenerational practice where (de)gendering comprises two family generations.

Globally, grandparents (particularly grandmothers) play a central role in providing regular childcare while mothers participate in employment. In many countries, childcare by grandmothers supports government policy agendas that aim to boost rates of maternal workforce participation. At the same time, mature-age (women) workers are targets of government strategies and policies aiming to boost labour market participation through extending their working lives. It is unclear whether and how expectations of grandparents' care and work responsibilities are aligned in policy discourses. Drawing on 63 submissions to four Australian government-initiated public inquiries, this article analyses stakeholder discourses encouraging women to increase their labour market participation within a context of known barriers and challenges in the Australian childcare system. The texts offer an ideal corpus for examining the kinds of 'model' grandparents that feature in official discourses, and reactions to them by a range of actors in the Australian work and care policy environment. Drawing on the theory of 'model ageing', the article uses feminist discourse analysis to interrogate the tensions and contradictions that arise when mothers and grandmothers both become the targets for labour market policies, with a focus on the discursive portrayals of older women as both (potential) workers and childcare providers.The article contributes new knowledge by making visible the latent, normative constructions of grandparenthood shaping contemporary policymaking in the areas of early childhood education and care and women's employment, and their implications for coherent, equitable policymaking for older adults.

The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped work arrangements, prompting widespread adoption of working from home (WFH) and raising questions about its implications for gendered labour. Using Australian panel data and fixed-effects models, this study investigates how WFH shapes time allocations to paid and domestic work among dual-earner households. We examine differential effects by gender, WFH intensity, and children’s age. Findings indicate a postpandemic rise in WFH prevalence and intensity, accompanied by divergent gendered patterns of labour time. Under high-intensity WFH, women particularly mothers of older children, expanded their paid work, while men, especially fathers of young children, substantially increased domestic work. Low-intensity WFH primarily supports additional paid work for both women and men. Overall, the results reveal that WFH does not consistently reinforce or challenge traditional gender patterns; rather, its effects are contingent on intensity and family context, producing both opportunities for and constraints on gender equality in the organisation of work.

This article explores how low-resourced single mothers in Victoria, Australia, navigate work, care responsibilities and interactions with the social support system. Drawing on 20 in-depth, qualitative interviews with single mothers on the margins of the formal labour market, and informed by concepts from affect theory, this article demonstrates how government rhetoric has been internalised by participants, shaping their attachment to paid work as a pathway to a positive future. Simultaneously, participants described feeling let down by the lack of government support for, and recognition of, the care work they undertake in the present.

This paper utilizes a natural experiment created by Australia's first national mandate for paid parental leave in 2011, to investigate employer-side mechanisms in motherhood wage penalties. Drawing on literature on cognitive bias, we hypothesize that maternity leave taking behaviors could trigger employer discrimination. We test this proposition by comparing whether and how four types of leave-taking behaviors affect the wage prospects of working mothers. Using fixed effect models with lagged dependent variables and nationally representative panel data, the Household Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) for the period 2005-2019, this study reveals that before the mandate, mothers who had to use unpaid leave due to ineligibility for employer-funded leave suffered pay penalties. After the mandate, mothers who forwent paid leave received pay premiums. Our study contributes to debates about parental leave policy and gender discrimination in the labor market by indicating that employers interpret contrasting leave taking behaviors differently, and reward employees in accordance with what they believe maternity leave behaviors imply about working mothers' conformity to the "ideal worker" norm.

This article explores why women miss out in the transition from the educational system to the labour market. Using nationally representative longitudinal data (2001–18) from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, we compare how long after graduation it takes men and women with tertiary qualifications (n = 2030) to achieve key labour market milestones: (1) getting a full-time job; (2) getting a permanent contract; (3) earning an average wage; (4) finding a job that matches their skill level. We find significant gender differences in reaching these milestones, confirming that time is a critical dimension for understanding gendered inequalities in the returns to education. We attribute findings to incompatible ‘timescapes’ across the institutions of education, family and employment. The more flexible timescape of education allows women to succeed, but the inflexible timescape of employment (particularly when combined with family responsibilities) impedes them from turning educational achievement into labour market progress.

Older single women in Australia are increasingly experiencing homelessness. Age and gender seem inherently related to single older women's housing crises, but no attempt has been made to account for the causes of their homelessness through an intersectional lens. This article develops a complex and contingent causal explanation of the structures and mechanisms implicated in growing homelessness for this group. We demonstrate an original use of critical realist-informed intersectional analysis which is characterized by stratified social ontology and emergence. We theoretically reframe existing literature to demonstrate how the intersectional causal powers of gender and age ('gender*age') discrimination and conventional life course experiences intersect to generate financial precarity for older women. Our causal model explains how economic insecurity, structural and individual contexts, and crisis events interact, challenging older women's housing security and precipitating first-time homelessness later in life.

Grandparents are an important source of childcare worldwide, but international patterns vary. We examine how demographic characteristics of parents, and of grandparents, factor into grandparent care provision considering the cultural assumptions and policy settings Australian families live within. Using the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, we identify determinants of both the demand for and the supply of grandparent childcare in Australia (4266 grandparents and 9822 parents). Results suggest that grandmothers and mothers, as much or more than fathers and mothers, balance their reciprocal participation in employment and childcare. University-educated grandmothers are more likely to provide regular childcare (at least once a week) and university-educated mothers are more likely to draw upon it, inconsistent with research in other countries. It appears grandparents are stepping in as both "mother savers" and "system savers," suggesting a need for more public policy support for Australian working mothers to capitalise on their increasingly high educational attainment.

In rich-economy countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand women are increasingly experiencing first-time homelessness in older age. Focusing on the specific case of Australia, this article develops a theoretical critical realist causal account of how a gendered role in care and social reproduction has increased contemporary homelessness risk by constraining women's capacity to build financial security. We show how gender, capitalism and age have intersected as social structures to explain gendered economic outcomes for women over the life course; and how life events, individual women's experiences, agency, and decision-making interact with these structures to explain homelessness. Women's gendered financial vulnerability, accumulated whilst living conventional lives, sits at the heart of older women's susceptibility to housing loss. Limited resources reduce their capacity to respond to crises challenging their housing security within the contemporary context of Australia's unaffordable housing market.

AbstractActive aging—encouraging greater economic and social productivity of older adults—has become the dominant paradigm in public policies concerning older people in the Western world. This chapter identifies contradictions within the paradigm, and a failure to adequately situate it within the family lives of older people, drawing attention to the relational circumstances that shape opportunities to age actively. The chapter suggests that the active aging paradigm does not adequately recognize the intersections—and contradictions—between active aging policies, family policies, and national work/care regimes. The authors focus on the (lack of) alignment in aspirations pertaining to employment and unpaid work, and their gendered implications. Comparing Australia and Sweden, they conclude that the current employment and family policy settings generally serve to support the active aging agenda of improving labor market participation in later life in Sweden. The Australian case illustrates that encouraging greater economic and social productivity of older adults is problematic if it is inadequately situated within the family lives and life courses of older people. Successfully and sustainably encouraging older people into paid work requires recognition of family contributions as forms of social and economic productivity. Gender equality in economic participation in later life necessitates investment in gender equality earlier in women’s lives, when gendered patterns of economic participation emerge. Lack of alignment in aspirations pertaining to aging policy and family policy has gendered implications, which can undermine the success of active aging policies and cause economic disadvantage to women as they age over the life course.

Reproductive domestic labor is shifting from its old norm of invisibly creating and maintaining labor power in the highly private and ostensibly non-economic zone of the household. This paper asks whether new forms of complex motherhood, and the means presented to mothers for coping with them in the digital age, should be conceived of as further unpaid labor that sits on top of old forms of exploitation. As mothers increasingly become digital reproductive laborers, the family home is becoming a public and highly economized zone: a workhouse for both standard employers and emerging parties who designate themselves as merely providing online services. In contrast to the frequently posited thesis that mothers are only indirectly drawn into the circuit of capital, this paper argues that the current situation creates the "mother commodity": a being whose social reproductive labor time is supercommodified via the normative addition of "audience commodity" labor duties.

Women’s1 lifelong health and nutrition status is intricately related to their reproductive history, including the number and spacing of their pregnancies and births, and for how long and how intensively they breastfeed their children. In turn, women’s reproductive biology is closely linked to their social roles and situation, including regarding economic disadvantage and disproportionate unpaid work. Recognizing, as well as reducing and redistributing women’s care and domestic work (known as the ‘Three Rs’), is an established framework for addressing women’s inequitable unpaid care work. However, the care work of breastfeeding presents a dilemma, and is even a divisive issue, for advocates of women’s empowerment, because reducing breastfeeding and replacing it with commercial milk formula risks harming women’s and children’s health. It is therefore necessary for the interaction between women’s reproductive biology and infant care role to be recognized in order to support women’s human rights and enable governments to implement economic, employment and other policies to empower women. In this paper, we argue that breastfeeding–like childbirth–is reproductive work that should not be reduced and cannot sensibly be directly redistributed to fathers or others. Rather, we contend that the Three Rs agenda should be reconceptualized to isolate breastfeeding as ‘sexed’ care work that should be supported rather than reduced with action taken to avoid undermining breastfeeding. This means that initiatives toward gender equality should be assessed against their impact on women’s ability to breastfeed. With this reconceptualization, adjustments are also needed to key global economic institutions and national statistical systems to appropriately recognize the value of this work. Additional structural supports such as maternity protection and childcare are needed to ensure that childbearing and breastfeeding do not disadvantage women amidst efforts to reduce gender pay gaps and gender economic inequality. Distinct policy interventions are also required to facilitate fathers’ engagement in enabling and supporting breastfeeding through sharing the other unpaid care work associated with parents’ time-consuming care responsibilities, for both infants and young children and related household work.

Since the Second World War there have been significant changes in the gender systems of industrialised countries, largely driven by increased female labour force participation. Changes in men's domestic participation have been comparatively incremental, and researchers contend the gender revolution will only be complete when men's and women's commitments are matched. Prior research on attitudes about gender roles has concentrated on women, but in this research, the focus is on men. Using growth curve analyses of Australian longitudinal data (N = 24,397), this article examines attitudes towards fatherhood and working fathers and how they changed between 2001 and 2015. Workforce status, relationship status and parenthood are strong predictors of different attitudinal outcomes and change for men and women, indicating that views were influenced by interest and exposure in ways that differed by gender. Further, the authors find attitudes towards fatherhood and working fathers have changed over the last 15 years, particularly amongst working fathers and mothers, which have become more supportive of greater father involvement in the care of children and the ability of working fathers to meet the needs of their children.

This article uses data from the longitudinal Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey to examine cross-spousal influences on workforce transitions by men ( n = 4667) and women ( n = 5051) aged 50–69. We assess how gender patterns in employment (full- and part-time work) and non-employment activity (unemployment, non-employment and homemaking) changed among this age group over the period 2001–2017, which included the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. Notwithstanding that more men than women were in full-time work, and more women than men were employed part time or were homemakers, over the period there was an overall rise in employment for both genders, which following the GFC continued most strongly for women. Random effects logistic regression on partnered men and women showed that prior to the GFC one spouse transitioning out of the labour market was associated with significantly higher odds of the other spouse also doing so. This implies coordination, for example spouses retiring together. In contrast, following the GFC, one spouse leaving paid employment was associated with higher odds of the other taking up work or increasing their hours, suggesting that the economic slowdown encouraged an added worker effect in those households, with one spouse compensating for the job loss of the other. The finding was apparent for both men and women.

This paper draws on data from Work and Care During COVID-19, an online survey of Australians during pandemic lockdown in May 2020 (n = 2,722). It focuses on how subsamples of lesbian, gay, and bisexual mothers and fathers in couples (n = 280) and single mothers (n = 480) subjectively experienced unpaid work and care during lockdown compared with heterosexual mothers and fathers in couples, and with partnered mothers, respectively. During the pandemic, nonheterosexual fathers’ subjective reports were less negative than those of their heterosexual counterparts, but differences between heterosexual and lesbian/bisexual mothers were more mixed. Unlike their partnered counterparts, more single mothers reported feeling satisfied than before with their balance of paid and unpaid work and how they spent their time overall during the pandemic, perhaps because they avoided partnership conflicts and particularly benefited from relaxed commuting and child care deadlines.

COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns meant many working parents were faced with doing paid work and family care at home simultaneously. To investigate how they managed, this article draws a subsample of parents in dual-earner couples (n = 1536) from a national survey of 2722 Australian men and women conducted during lockdown in May 2020. It asked how much time respondents spent in paid and unpaid labour, including both active and supervisory care, and about their satisfaction with work-family balance and how their partner shared the load. Overall, paid work time was slightly lower and unpaid work time was very much higher during lockdown than before it. These time changes were most for mothers, but gender gaps somewhat narrowed because the relative increase in childcare was higher for fathers. More mothers than fathers were dissatisfied with their work-family balance and partner's share before COVID-19. For some the pandemic improved satisfaction levels, but for most they became worse. Again, some gender differences narrowed, mainly because more fathers also felt negatively during lockdown than they had before.

The Covid-19 pandemic turned daily lives upside down. Lockdowns and physical distancing meant hundreds of thousands of people switched to working from home, significantly blurring the temporal and spatial boundaries between paid work, domestic labour and caring for others. This article explores gender relations, and the division of employment, domestic labour and care, drawing on early results from an online survey, Work and Care in the Time of Covid-19, carried out between 7 May and 4 June 2020.