Key points
- There was a 17 per cent increase in the number of adult children living with their parents.
- The proportion of married couples decreased between 2016 and 2021, but the proportion of de facto couples rose.
- There were very big gender gaps in the amount of hours of unpaid domestic work, with far more women reporting doing 15 to 30 hours a week of household labour.
More young people remain living in the family home into their late 20s and early 30s, and the proportion of young people living solo has also increased, census data shows.
Analysis of the first tranche of 2021 data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows there were 456,543 people aged between 25 and 34 living with their parents, an increase of almost 17 per cent since the 2016 survey, and more young people were living alone thanks to a decline in the number of share houses during the pandemic.
Katie Greenaway, a University of Melbourne psychology lecturer, lives solo and says more women are making the choice to get their careers up and running before moving to the next life stage.Credit:Justin McManus
As the proportion of married households declined from 37.9 per cent in 2016 to 37.2 per cent in 2021 – despite the addition of 25,000 same-sex marriages – de facto households rose from 7.8 per cent of dwellings to 9.2 per cent.
The number of one-person households also increased, from 9.5 per cent of homes to 10.1 per cent, and more young people were living this way. Probably due to the pandemic, sociologists said, there was a relative dip in the number of people in share houses.
Share-house dwellers suffered serious socioeconomic shocks in the pandemic, research by University of Melbourne academics found in 2020, as data showed they were a vulnerable demographic.
Four out of five people living in share houses were aged under 35, and half of them were in non-permanent jobs. Three-quarters experienced job losses in the pandemic and one in five skipped meals to pay for necessities, which could go some way to explaining the larger numbers who chose to live with their parents.
More young people living alone could also be down to personal choice, said Katie Greenaway, a psychology lecturer at the University of Melbourne who lives happily single and alone.
“It could also reflect the increase in singledom in general. There are more people who are single for longer, and who prefer to live alone rather than in a share house situation or with their family,” she said.
“We’re taking a bit more time to get through some of those life milestones previous generations were a bit quicker to fall into.
“It’s also an act of choice for many people, women wanting to set up careers and things before moving to that stage, and it’s becoming more normative.”
While the financial strains of COVID-19 were an obvious cause of young adults moving home or remaining in the family home, Dharma Arunachalam, a Monash University professor of sociology and anthropology, said this trend existed before the virus made it to Australia.
“If you look at the long-term trend in non-dependent children living with their parents, between 2011 and 2016 the proportion was also increasing.
“There has been a lot more happening than just COVID. COVID probably made it worse, and made [the trend] stronger between 2016 and 2021, but going back to the causes suggested for that increase, financial ability of young people to be able to live on their own and pay for their rent was already a factor,” he said.
The fact young people could not move around as much as they usually tend to probably contributed to an increase in those living in sole-person households during the pandemic, Professor Arunachalam said.
‘We’re taking a bit more time to get through some of those life milestones.’
Housing affordability and a difficult labour market at the time the census was taken were reasons for the jump in young adults at home. The Australian Institute of Family Studies had noted this trend as far back as 2016.
Census statistics supported the trend of more people starting families later, as seen in the number of women and men still caring for children into middle age.
In the 35 to 44-year-old age group, 1.04 million women and 862,771 men were caring for their children, but between the ages of 45 and 54, more men (527,151) were still doing childcare than women (511,283), which could possibly reflect more men having second families.
In the increasingly fraught area of who does the unpaid domestic labour, the census found a vast gender gap across the age groups.
Vastly larger numbers of women are doing 30-plus hours of unpaid domestic labour in their prime child-rearing – and earning – years.Credit:iStock
In the 25-to-34 age group, when many people are starting families and working, more than five times as many women did 30 hours or more of unpaid household duties a week as men.
Among male census respondents in this group, 41,733 men said they did more than 30 hours of domestic labour, compared with 228,536 women.
In the 35-to-44 aged group – ages at which women reach the peak of their earnings – the number of women saying they do 30 or more hours a week of unpaid work at home (340,387) was more than 4½ times that of the number of men who did 30-plus hours (71,917).
Overall, nearly 1.4 million women said they did 30 hours or more of domestic work a week, compared with 394,995 men.
Twice as many women (nearly 1.7 million) said they did 15 to 29 hours a week of home chores compared with men (nearly 820,000).
The enduring gender pay gap in Australia, which is pronounced after women have children, is in part attributed to the inequity of unpaid domestic labour, including the so-called “mental load”. Fresh research by the Australian Institute of Family Studies showed women also carry the vast majority of this work.
Professor Lyn Craig, professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Melbourne, said it was disappointing to see the census show that domestic inequalities continue.
“It does reflect and create inequalities in the labour market as well as high stress … trying to manage it all,” Craig said.
“I am hoping that some of the new government focus (federal, NSW) on structural constraints such as childcare affordability and actively tackling the gender pay gap will make some difference, but it’s a long slow process, and women deserve better.”
The gender gap in between men and women caring for their own children was much smaller than the gap in household labour. Between the ages of 25 and 44, more women said they were caring for children than men, but by the age of 45 more men than women said they were caring for their own children.
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