Self-Employment, Work-Family Time, and the Gender Division of Childcare

Lyn Craig, University of New South Wales
Abigail Powell, University of New South Wales

Does being self-employed, as opposed to an employee, make a difference to how parents juggle the demands of work and family? This paper uses data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey 2006, to identify associations between self-employment and the time working mothers (N=855) and fathers (N=1168) spend in paid work, domestic labour and childcare, and when during the day they perform these activities. The quantity of time self-employed mothers devote to each activity differs substantially from mothers who are employees, while fathers’ time is relatively constant. Results imply that mothers use self-employment as a do-it-yourself ‘family-friendly’ strategy to combine paid work and childcare activities, but that fathers’ time priority is paid work regardless of employment type. Self-employment is thus not associated with a gender redistribution of paid and unpaid work, although does appear to facilitate some rescheduling of work and family activities for both mothers and fathers.