Presented by ANU Gender Institute and National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH), ANU

Although everyone has 24 hours each day, how many hours people commit to the market, to care, to rest, to leisure and therefore to health, along with how fast they do things, is neither fixed nor a given. Women spend more time doing unpaid work and caregiving, are increasingly expected to dedicate more time to the labour market and are more likely than men to rush. Women therefore, may face greater time commitments in total, more intensified time, and proportionally more of their time will be unrewarded by income. On the other hand, men dedicate long hours to the labour market, time which is fixed, rigid and increasingly intensified, and report higher rates of work-family conflict than women. To what extent do these gender differences in time contribute to gender differences in health?  This seminar will detail research considering the connections between gender, time and health led by researchers at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH) within the Society Culture and Health team. This seminar will cover current theories of gender inequality and population health, gendered thresholds in paid work hours, gendered aspects of household time, including time in paid and unpaid work and their associations with health, children’s views of fathers, and work time and work-family conflict and its implications for both parents’ and children’s mental health. 

Speakers

Jenny Welsh is a Senior Research Officer at NCEPH working on an ARC Funded Linkage Project “Time Scarcity in Australian Families: Another inequity?”

Huong Dinh is a Research Fellow at NCEPH. She completed her PhD in economics and her research seeks to reveal how upstream processes (e.g., international trade and labour markets) shape community, family and individual’s wellbeing.

Lyndall Strazdins is an Associate Professor and Future Fellow at NCEPH, her research considers contemporary predicaments of work and care, their health consequences and the way time is a social determinant of health and health inequalities.