For decades, teaching has been framed as a “family-friendly” profession, appealing to women with caregiving responsibilities due to school-hour alignment and perceived flexibility. This framing is out of step with reality. In Australia, where women make up 78% of the teaching workforce, the profession is facing a major retention crisis. Typically, this issue is explored as an ungendered problem. But, in order to get a complete understanding of how teaching labour, domestic labour and caring responsibilities contribute to teacher attrition, it’s time we connected the dots between gender, care, and teacher shortages.
We need to confront whether the emotional labour required to teach, compounded by women’s overrepresentation in domestic responsibilities at home is contributing to the departure of women teachers from the profession? We must stop pretending that teaching is an ungendered workforce with uniform demands on teachers’ time and emotional resources.
At the Intersection of Care and Work
Women teachers often find themselves at the crossroads of three intersecting spheres:
- The expectation to provide unpaid or under-recognised care at home
- A profession that is feminised and care-based, yet increasingly pressured by performance metrics
- Caregiving demands from children, male partners in heterosexual partnerships and ageing parents
At this intersection lies a truth many women teachers live daily: their dual roles at home and in their workplaces are not just exhausting, they are unsustainable. It is here that emotional labour accumulates, time poverty intensifies, and burnout takes hold.
What the Data Tell Us
Recent AITSL data (2025) and union reports (2024) identify escalating workloads, lack of flexibility, and declining morale as key drivers of attrition. Yet the gendered dimension of this crisis remains obscured and invisibilised.
This is not a story of individual burnout. It is a structural issue that is deeply embedded in how we value (or fail to value) care work and how gender roles in schools and home make the working lives of women teachers untenable.
While we often hear generous platitudes from politicians about how valued teachers are and how important they are, these are empty words without the recognition that largely, it is a highly flawed system built on women’s time and labour.
We cannot meaningfully reckon with workforce and workload issues until we confront this fact and make appropriate structural changes to teachers’ work arrangements.
The Double Shift Is Real- And Growing
Despite the narrative that teaching work aligns well with the demands of parenting roles; the reality is far more complex.
Women teachers report working up to 50 hours per week, including nights, weekends, and during school holidays. Add to that the “second shift” of parenting, elder care, and household management, often performed without institutional support or flexibility, and it’s little wonder that many are choosing to reduce hours, take career breaks, or exit the profession altogether.
Many of these decisions are made quietly. There is rarely a dramatic resignation. More often, it’s a slow retreat from full-time teaching: a move to part-time, casual roles, or early retirement. This gradual exit contributes to the “leaking pipeline” of skilled, experienced educators, particularly women in mid-career.
Our research is grounded in care-focused feminism and devaluation theory, approaches that shine a light on the political and economic undervaluing of care work. Teaching, long considered a “natural” extension of women’s nurturing roles, is not just underpaid; it is under-respected, especially when compared to male-dominated professions with similar qualifications.
Where to From Here?
If we are serious about addressing the teacher shortage, we must ask harder questions about the gendered realities of the profession. That means:
- Acknowledging caregiving as a structural factor in workforce planning
- Designing policies that support, not penalise teachers with family responsibilities
- Valuing care work as legitimate, skilled labour in both public and private life
This is not just about keeping teachers in classrooms. It’s about retaining the experience, insight, and leadership of women educators whose labour has long been taken for granted. To create a sustainable future for education, we must reimagine schools as places that support, rather than strain, the lives of those who teach in them.
Adriana Bonifacio is a PhD candidate and sessional academic in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. Her doctoral research investigates the relationship between women teachers’ work–family responsibilities and pervasive teacher shortages in Australia. She’s on LinkedIn. Jo Lampert is the Professor of Teacher Education for Social Transformation at Monash University. She has led alternative pathways into teaching in hard-to-staff schools for over 15 years, most recently as Director of the Commonwealth and State supported Nexus M. Teach in Victoria, a social justice, employment-based pathway whereby preservice teachers work as Education Support Staff prior to gaining employment as paraprofessionals (Nexus). She’s on LinkedIn. Stephanie Wescott is a lecturer in humanities in Social Sciences in the School of Education, Culture and Society, Monash University. Her research explores socio-political phenomena and their intersections with education policy and practice. She’s on LinkedIn.