• Ekaterina Hertog Research Fellow, Department of Sociology, Oxford University

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

Unpaid household work is a major activity that impacts economic and social well-being. It is essential for human reproduction and enables all other forms of work. Recent debates about the “future of work” have engaged with the impact of technology on labour from various perspectives but have yet to address unpaid labour. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on two questions: First, what is the likelihood that various types of unpaid work will be automated? Second, what is the likely impact of such automation on time savings and gender equality, notably by facilitating female participation in the paid labour market? We use three established estimates of the likelihood of automation of paid work occupations as proxies for the future likelihood of automation of similar housework and care work activities. We specifically match paid work occupations with a harmonized list of 19 housework and care work activities in UK and Japanese national time use data. This matching enables us to simulate several plausible scenarios of how automating a variety of unpaid work tasks may impact the unpaid workloads across gender and age groups. We find that most unpaid work activities are distributed within a range of 50 to 85 per cent across the two different automation likelihood scores. We analyse how the likely automation of these tasks is to decrease women’s daily unpaid workload. We also run a simulation to investigate whether the reduction of the domestic load is sufficient for men and women currently outside of the labour market to take on full-time or part-time paid work. We estimate that automation could free 1.9-2.4% of women in Japan and 0.4-0.8% in the UK to take up full-time employment and 5.4-7.0% of Japanese women and 3.7-4.9% of British women to take on part-time jobs. The impact for men is much smaller than that for women, except for the potential full-time employment which is higher for British men compared to British women. The above is just one illustration of how labour-saving technology in the household can increase individuals’ time use choices. Women may also choose to spend the newly available time to sleep more, develop their human capital, have more rest, etc. Our broader argument, therefore, is that automation could bring about increased personal choice which can lead to greater well-being.

Dr Hertog’s research interests lie at the intersection of family sociology and digital sociology. She leads the ESRC-funded DomesticAI project that aims to scope new technologies’ potential to free up time now locked into unpaid domestic labour and measure how willing people are to introduce these technologies into their private lives. Ekaterina is also a research fellow at the GenTime research project, investigating gender differences in time use in East Asia. Ekaterina’s time use research looks at factors that impact the gender balance in the domestic division of labour, associations between children’s time use patterns and their natal family characteristics, and gender differences in time use at old age.

Ekaterina’s earlier research includes a study of never-married single mothers in Japan that provides an in-depth analysis of Japanese women’s decision-making on childbearing issues and the related value systems. It was published as a book by Stanford University Press titled ‘Tough Choices: Bearing an Illegitimate Child in Contemporary Japan’. Ekaterina also used customer data from one of the largest Japanese marriage agencies to analyse partner search processes, identifying the social factors that drive individual success and failure on the Japanese marriage market.