Who does the work in sustainable households? A time and gender analysis in New South Wales, Australia

Households in the affluentWest have become an important target of government andNGO

campaigns to encourage more environmentally sustainable behaviours, but there has been

little research into the gender implications of such policies. This article investigates the

role of gender and time in the sustainability practices of six heterosexual households

with young children, committed participants in the Sustainable Illawarra Super Challenge

programme in 2009. Women spent more total time on sustainable practices, and did so

more often.Men’s contributions relatedmostly to gardening and transport, in longer blocks

of time. In these households, sustainability became a highly gendered practice because

of the different roles in homemaking. Women resisted constructions of themselves as

being closer to nature, and shouldered expectations of sustainability as part of their roles as

mothers and household managers. They experienced time as overlapping and fragmented,

with no distinction between work and leisure. Men contributed to sustainable practices

mainly through activities understood as leisure, in longer blocks of time. Our temporality

lens also illustrates the gendered ways that old practices become deroutinised and

new practices reroutinised. While men were often responsible for the labour and upfront

time required to start or research a project, the responsibility of everyday implementation

and habit-changing commonly fell to women. These findings illustrate how gendered

analyses help identify both opportunities for, and constraints against, change towards

sustainability. Opportunities include the strong connections between both mothers’ and

fathers’ understanding of good parenting and the importance they attach to household

sustainability. Constraints include the temporal challenges faced by households, and how

these interact with wider structural and labour roles..