Is there a gendered component to leisure time? Who organises and facilitates it in heterosexual couples? While the reinstatement of the Time use Survey is an important step in understanding how Australians use their time, in today’s analysis Julia Cook (@julia_anne_cook) of University of Newcastle (@Uni_Newcastle) and Dan Woodman (@DrDanWoodman) of University of Melbourne (@unimelbsoc) share the findings from their recently-published paper which utilises an in-depth approach to not only time use but also how time is coordinated and how women and men feel about task-sharing.

What time use surveys can tell us

Questions about how we use our time are central to the issue of gender equality as well as the development of good policy. However, for over a decade, it’s been hard to tell how Australians are using their time.

In late 2018 the Australian Federal Government announced, as part of the Women’s Economic Security statement, that the How Australians Use Their Time survey would be reinstated in 2020-2021. This survey was last conducted in 2006, and provided a key resource for understanding how households allocate their time between paid and unpaid labour. The survey asked respondents to fill out a time use diary for two days, which were broken into five-minute increments, and the participants were asked to record their main activity, who they did it for, what else they were doing at the same time, where they were and who they were with.

Since 2006 Australia has weathered a global financial crisis, witnessed significant population growth and demographic change, faced booms in key housing markets and experienced an ongoing digital revolution. Needless to say, the ways in which we use our time has undoubtedly changed, likely in ways that have strong implications for issues of gender equity. The findings of this new iteration of the time use survey will be essential for understanding how. However, when this new data enters the policy, academic and public arenas it is important to recognise that they cannot tell the full story of how we use our time. Specifically, data of this type can provide invaluable know of what is happening, but is less able to provide information about how such events are experienced and understood by individuals.

Providing context for time use data

While the couples in this research pointed to preference and aptitude, coordinating schedules and leisure time was generally women’s work. Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev from Pexels — While the couples in this research pointed to preference and aptitude, coordinating schedules and leisure time was generally women’s work. Photo by **Stanislav Kondratiev** from **Pexels**

We took this question as our point of focus in a recent study of the way in which young heterosexual couples use their time. In late 2017 we conducted research with 53 participants, among them 11 heterosexual couples who form the focus of this analysis. The participants were each asked to download a smartphone application which would provide them with a private and secure space in which they could share text, audio and video-based posts with the researchers. They were then asked to make posts to the app a minimum of five times a day over a weeklong period, with each of the couples engaging with the app in the same week. The participants were asked to post about what they were doing and how they were feeling with the intention that these posts would function as a qualitative time-use diary. At the end of this week the participants took part in an individual interview in which they discussed their posts.

The participants were aged between 25-40, with most of them clustering in their late 20s, from a mix of cities and regional areas. Of those in the couples, 18 out of the 22 participants were tertiary educated and worked in professional positions, while the remaining four worked in managerial roles and trades. Four of the couples were parents, with the female partners in each working part time. The remainder of the participants worked full time. Whether parents or not, they tended to have complex and busy lives.

In this study we were particularly interested in how the participants found or planned time together, as well as with their friends and extended family, in the context of earlier findings that young adults’ work-life schedules are increasingly complex. When asked about this in the interview the couples generally stated that the work of finding or creating time together and for social and leisure pursuits was either distributed evenly or slanted slightly towards one partner. However, closer examination of the participants’ specific schedules, and the ways in which they were managed, demonstrated that the practices through which an ‘egalitarian split’ in organising and managing shared time was achieved were commonly implemented, managed and maintained by the female partner.

Delving into everyday experiences

Samantha and Jacob

This tendency was evident for Samantha, an accountant, and her de facto partner Jacob, a web developer. Both worked full time, undertook voluntary work, and belonged to multiple clubs and professional associations, and on top of this Jacob ran his own side business, meaning that their hours of work typically exceeded a conventional full-time schedule, and that their work often took place outside of 9–5 hours. Samantha and Jacob appeared to have a relatively egalitarian split with regard to managing their schedules and finding time together. For instance, Samantha reported that:

We both contribute ideas about what we wanna do, and then we plan out the time to do some, most of them. Now, every Sunday night we have a meeting and we will discuss all what our weeks look like, and then what we are going to do on Friday night…. We both share ideas.

However, when asked how long they had this routine, Samantha told us it had only been in place for approximately a month, at her instigation and in response to her frustrations with not having enough time together. Prior to this arrangement the couple had used a shared calendar-based mobile phone app which allowed them to see each other’s schedules. However, Samantha found that Jacob was not very reliable in keeping his calendar updated, and that for this reason she often did not know what he was doing or where he was:

Sometimes like in the past I was like where are you? And I would never get a reply, I would get so upset. We share the calendars together, and I could see what he has on tonight, but if we don’t update our calendars on time we would just lose track of each other. So that’s why sometimes I got – I got a bit cranky and was like ‘why don’t you update your calendar?’

Jacob echoed Samantha’s narrative, reporting that she was frustrated with his failure to update his calendar and that their coordination of time together had recently improved. However, he did not attribute this to their Sunday night planning and increased diligence with recording his plans. Rather, he attributed it to weekly meetings with a life coach:

So, I meet with [coach] on a Monday night and plan out what my priorities are over the next week. Put that into my calendar, and then I’ll have a bit of an accountability check of how I went the previous week. As part of the goals, I’ll put in not just work stuff but business, relationship, finance, career progression, all the things that I think are important.

When asked why he sought coaching Jacob stated:

I went to her and said, ‘Look, I want help with balancing everything,’ because I knew that, in theory, that I did want to have a more balanced life.

Ultimately, while Samantha and Jacob each contributed to managing their shared time and reported that the work of scheduling time together was relatively evenly distributed, when these practices were interrogated further a complex gender division and inequality emerged. Specifically, Samantha originally instigated calendar sharing and then, when that was not successful, the Sunday night planning. Jacob complied with these plans, but essentially outsourced his scheduling when Samantha expressed dissatisfaction with his original efforts.

Carla and Nathan

Importantly, the tendency for men to outsource the minutiae of planning labour was reflected throughout the sample. However, rather than outsourcing to a life coach, many of the men instead appeared to essentially ‘outsource’ to their partner. For instance, when Carla, a self-employed hairdresser who worked from home and routinely worked evenings, was asked who organised social events for herself and her husband Nathan, a property valuer with whom she shared two children, she initially stated that Nathan was more proactive about planning social events:

[Nathan] is a lot more, ‘Let’s go do this’, where I’m more a, ‘Can’t we just stay at home and spend time together?’ And [Nathan] is more like … he’ll say, ‘Let’s invite some people over for tea’, and I’m like, ‘I’ve literally just finished work. The last thing I want to do is deal with more people.’

However, it appeared that although Nathan was more likely to suggest social events, the labour of making these events happen – inviting family and friends, cooking – generally fell to Carla. Additionally, Carla found herself disproportionately responsible for managing their children’s social and extra-curricular commitments. While Jacob and Samantha and Nathan and Carla’s lives looked markedly different, they each discussed planning and organisation as a shared task in a way that obscured the fact that the ‘work’ of establishing a planning regime or seeing plans through fell disproportionately to women.

Bruce and Deborah

The young men were sometimes apologetic for times they felt they were asking a lot of their partners. However, in general the common deviations from the professed norm of a shared responsibly for this scheduling and time-based work were framed as a result of preferences and predispositions. For instance, while discussing their use of a shared calendar app Bruce, a broadcaster, told us that his wife Deborah, a doctor, took on the greater share of scheduling labour due to her superior organisation:

She’s definitely a lot more organised than I am. Um, but she’s the one that insisted on us having a calendar that’s in both of our phones, so that if she has something, it pops up in mine and vice versa. You know, a lot of the things that we do end up being things organised through her friends or her family, but, um, I still feel like we both try and do things.

Views of this type were also reflected by Deborah:

I probably do most of the cooking, but that’s mainly because I am home first at night time for dinners and things like that.

Individual stories reflect wider societal norms

Although the participants reported a relatively equal sharing of domestic labour, including the work of managing the complex schedules, when we delved into the detail of their posts and interviews it was evident that this was not entirely true in practice. This was not completely naturalised, with the women presenting some exasperation at their partner’s lack of organisation and some of the men apologetic about the inequality. Yet, the participants rarely presented the differences within their relationships to us directly in gendered terms, framing them instead in terms of choice and preference, and in so doing brushing over the structured gendering of the work of managing the synchronisation of at least two complex schedules.

It is important to be mindful that information about the meaning and management of time is not easily captured in quantitative measures of time use. The upcoming How Australians Use Their Time survey will be immensely valued and timely. But we must recognize the caveat to using these data as a panacea for understanding temporal gender inequality. In a recent seminar at for the UN Human Development Report Office’s seminar series Gayatri Koolwal presented a report promoting the inclusion of time use surveys to inform development agendas in developing countries as a way to address gender inequalities. This report was evocatively titled ‘Invisible no more’. It is important that, in our use of time use data to promote policy that mitigates gender inequities, we are careful to avoid inadvertently creating a new space for invisible labour.

This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here and follow us on Twitter @PolicyforWomen

Is she just more organised? Understanding the gendered labour of synchronisation and scheduling