A snapshot of Australia’s labour market has revealed couples are more likely to live without dependants, and 75 per cent of single-parent families are headed up by mothers.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has issued its research on the labour force, which tracked the employment of families across the country.
A family is defined by the ABS as two or more related people who live in the same household, and can reflect couples with or without children, couples with dependents, single parents, and siblings living together.
It found the vast majority of family households in Australia were couples.
Bjorn Jarvis, head of labour statistics at the ABS, said the data was updated yearly to keep track of how different families were getting by.
“The key reason behind what we do is providing an understanding beyond just your young couples — it’s understanding what fathers are doing, what mothers are doing and what same-sex families are doing,” he said.
“There’s a whole range of decisions that people make around what they do in the labour market … and this data brings all that together to see what’s driving family units and the characteristics of those families.”
The report broke down the employment status of people who are in families, and categorised it based on whether they had dependants or not.
Dependants can be children, or can refer to elderly family or other people reliant on the family unit for income.
The report also found:
- 95 per cent of couple families with dependants had one or both parents employed
- The number of couple families with dependants where both parents were employed has gone up by 13 per cent, to 73 per cent
- 68 per cent of single mothers were employed, compared to 75 per cent of single fathers
“A lot of it is continuing trends … if you were to look at couple families who had dependents [both being employed], about 20 years ago that would have been at 61.4 per cent,” Mr Jarvis said.
“Whereas if you look at the last decade, it’s now up to 72.8 per cent.
“There’s been a pretty big push for couples of families to have both parents employed.”
Nearly 400,000 families reported they had an employed single mother, while 121,000 reported they had an employed single father.
However the data still found a single father was more likely to be employed than a single mother, particularly when a dependant was a newborn.
Projections released earlier this year found while single-father households would likely grow over the next 20 years, single-mother households would continue to dominate.
One-parent households were also more likely to live with dependants, while couples lived without dependants in 57 per cent of cases.
Mr Jarvis said this could be attributed to Australia’s aging population.
“It’s the fact that we’ve got couples that are grandparents that are getting old,” he said.
“They’ve still got family, but they don’t have kids living with them anymore.
“You get more and more of these older families, [who are] couples that are living longer.”
The return to the workforce following pregnancy could also be seen in the figures, with many logging full-time employment when their child was five-years-of-age.
The data also found the number of families in Australia has increased by 1 million over the last 10 years; also in keeping with the projections flagged by the ABS in June.
“It’s important to track this on an annual basis so that policymakers can get an understanding of just how many people may be in a particular situation,” Mr Jarvis said.
“Most labour market information is highlighting that Australia is likely more employed than it’s ever been in past, particularly when you’re looking at the women in the labour market.
“The data highlights [overall]… families are more employed.”
