Wollongong resident, Courtney Fraser’s phone lights up with photos shared by friends from a birthday dinner she was meant to attend.
The photographs show cocktails, laughter, and the kind of warm, low-stakes joy that has become rare in her life. Instead of clinking glasses, she is folding jeans under harsh, fluorescent lights at her second job in a Shellharbour retail store.
Ms Fraser works full-time in allied health and part-time in retail, and often clocks up to sixty-five hours in a single week.
Her weekday shifts start as early as 7:30 in the morning and sometimes stretch into overnight emergency calls at the hospital.
Weekends are often spent on the shop floor.
It’s a gruelling schedule that leaves little room for rest, let alone leisure.
“My personal hobbies aren’t very time-consuming. I really enjoy reading, going to the gym, seeing my friends, whether it’s going to their home, or out for drinks or movies,” Ms Fraser said.
“But even though they’re not time-consuming, they still require time during business hours: like cinemas, restaurants, cafes, and gyms.
“Often I can’t participate in those because I don’t have the time after travelling between jobs, working long hours, and sometimes finishing at 10 at night.”
Like Ms Fraser, thousands of Australian women sacrifice recreation to balance the demands of multiple jobs to make ends meet.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2024, there were 536,000 women working multiple jobs, which is 72,700 more than the number of men juggling similar workloads.
The ABS defines a multiple jobholder as someone who works more than one job at the same time, measured through a combination of household surveys and linked tax data to capture employment activity across different sectors.
These numbers aren’t collected from one single source. Instead, they’re built from monthly labour force surveys, quarterly industry-level labour accounts, and income tax records in the Jobs in Australia dataset, giving the ABS a multi-angle view of Australia’s workforce.
The weight of working multiple jobs falls heaviest on women aged 20 to 24, who consistently ranked top in the charts for holding more than one job across every quarter of 2024. Ms Fraser falls within this cohort, and is living the reality behind those numbers.
“I feel a lot of pressure to stop working as much, but on the other side of it, to be meeting all these financial expectations: saving to buy a house, going on holidays, keeping up an image there’s a lot of pressure there,” she said.
Elsewhere in Wollongong, Belinda Mancer, 36, a solo mum, who works full-time as a NSW Health project manager, has several side hustles to survive and provide for her six-year-old child.
With 80 per cent custody, Ms Mancer carries the bulky weight of parenting while navigating the rising cost of living. Her day job follows a traditional 9-to-5 schedule, but her evenings and weekends are filled with consulting work and teaching pilates. She went back to work when her daughter was just 10 months old.
“Cost of living is really tough right now, especially for single mums like me with majority custody,” Ms Mancer said. “Child support just isn’t enough, so we have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet.”
During the recent federal election, a debate broke out over whether public service workers should be required to work exclusively from the office, a proposal put forward by the then Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, a stance he reversed just 48 hours later.
For Ms Mancer who works remotely on some days, the debate was scary.
“Flexible working isn’t a luxury for me, it’s what allows me to take my daughter to dancing and still manage my workload,” she said.
“Without it, I honestly don’t know how I’d survive.”
Ms Mancer is one among 157,000 Australian women who carry the load of multiple jobs within the health care and social assistance industry, a sector that alone accounts for nearly 30 per cent of the country’s women holding more than one job.
Despite the challenges of multiple jobs, Ms Mancer takes pride in being able to provide for her daughter, and encourages other mothers to maintain some connection to the workforce.
“My advice to every mum is to have a side gig or a career, even if it’s just part-time,” she said.
“Being a stay-at-home mum is the hardest job in the world, and I respect that completely. But taking time away from work can affect your ability to provide for your children if your circumstances change, like separation.”
University of Sydney Business School professor Angela Knox said the reasons behind women being more likely to hold multiple jobs might have to do with structural settings than financial.
“It’s probably because women are more likely to be working on a part-time basis and often a temporary basis as well, and they’re arranging their work hours around their family commitments,” Professor Knox said.
Whereas, Sydney based think tank, McKell Institute’s chief executive, Ed Cavanough said tax reform was necessary to help people doing multiple jobs.
“If you have one part-time job and then you are working in a cafe doing a few extra hours it’s likely that second job you’re going to be taxed at a higher rate than your first job,” he said.
“What that means is there’s several hundred dollars owing to you in a tax return that you’re not likely to see for another six months at least.”
Back at the cafe where we met for this interview, Ms Fraser glances at the time, her half-drunk latte now lukewarm. She pushes her chair back, stands up, and smiles politely.
“I’ve got about an hour to get to the shop,” she said, slinging her tote bag over her shoulder.
