Assessing Change in the Distribution of Domestic Labour over the Lifecourse : Pathways out of Relationships

It is well-known that pathways through the lifecourse have changed in recent years. People are marrying later, having fewer children, living together in cohabiting relationships, separating and divorcing more frequently. These changes have consequences for understanding the organisation of domestic work. Although much previous work on domestic labour has focused on married couples, it is becoming increasingly clear that we need to consider how housework patterns vary at different stages of the lifecourse and in different kinds of households. This is important not just because we need to acknowledge household diversity, but because research has shown that previous relationship experiences will affect the ways in which individuals and couples organise domestic labour in their current households. In this paper we build on our earlier work in which we examined the effect of different pathways into marriage on housework patterns during marriage. We extend this earlier work in two main ways. First we consider pathways out of marriage and cohabitation and the effect of these pathways on housework hours across different household types for both men and women. Second we use 5 waves of HILDA data enabling a wide range of lifecourse transitions to be examined