This seminar is about the often unacknowledged and under-researched need to have time for health. This has been the focus of my research for over a decade, as I have sought to demonstrate the importance of time and the way time is so fundamental to both health and gender inequality. The seminar starts by exploring ways to think about time as a social determinant of health, then how measuring and modelling time offers special challenges to researchers, with two studies on physical activity of where we have sought to address this. Next, I discuss work on the interplay between long workhours, earnings and gender inequality in the labour market, using evidence from a recent study comparing Australia and Germany. We have sought to model the inequality system, which we call the Hour-Glass Ceiling, to show how health becomes an entrenched but invisible penalty for women or anyone who want to combine work with care. Finally, I present some work in progress – tentatively titled ‘Survival of the fastest’, some qualitative insights into the acceleration of work, and the implication for minds, bodies and age discrimination as the workforce ages.
 

Australian National University, AUSTRALIA

Lyndall Strazdins is a Professor at the Australian National University, a Public Health academic and a Clinical Psychologist. Her work examines contemporary labour markets, overwork and the time clash between work and care, documenting how this harms both health and gender equality. Her research has also considered the intergenerational reach of work time into the lives and wellbeing of children, and the impact of accelerating work on older workers’ health. She advocates the need to address long work hours as a Work Health and Safety problem as well as a gender equity priority – terming this convergence between long hours, health and inequality the Hour-Glass ceiling. She was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and was awarded the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie International Fellowship Seal of Excellence, publishing widely in interdisciplinary health journals such as Social Science and Medicine, and her publications have been ranked among the top in their year (2007, 2016) in her field.  Professor Strazdins has also spearheaded theory and evidence for how time is as important as money for health, including new ways to investigate time longitudinally and as a household (not just an individual) resource. Lack of time is one of the most important reasons why people do not exercise regularly, or eat healthy food, and she has published the first book on this topic: The unequal hour: How time is shaping health, 2024.  She has been a scientific advisor to the Australian Government Investing in Women, seeking to support gender equality in employment in Asian labor markets and to the Australian Defense Forces on mental health and families. She has presented to the Japanese Gender Equality Bureau and served as Scientific Advisor for multiple Federal and State Government initiatives in Australia, including Health Promotion and Work Health and Safety. She was the Director of the Research School of Population Health at the Australian National University (ANU) and designed the ANU Mental health and wellbeing strategy.