While work hours dropped slightly in the past year because of the financial crisis, the pressure on women to juggle work with other responsibilities increased.
"Women's work-life situation is worse than men's and appears to be deteriorating, especially amongst full-timers," the report said. "Women are much more likely than men to feel rushed and pressed for time, and these feelings of time pressure appear to be becoming more common."
One of the report's authors, the director of the University of South Australia Centre for Work and Life, Barbara Pocock, said women felt obliged to stay in paid work as the global recession cast a shadow over their partners' jobs.
Women in full-time work "are feeling like they have to hang in there as their partners' jobs became less secure", she said.
While men reported more life interference from work as a consequence of longer hours, where the genders worked similar hours, women fared worse.
This was particularly acute for mothers in rural and regional Australia. There, women accepted more work off the farm to compensate for the drought and were not relieved of duties at home.
"They, like their urban sisters, haven't given up their day jobs as domestic workers and carers, reflecting the double day of women in the city," Professor Pocock said.
A third of women working full-time complained work "often or almost always" restricted time with family and friends. This was up from a quarter of women two years ago.
And two-thirds of full-time working women said they were rushed for time, compared with half of men.
Similarly, part-time work had worse consequences for women than men. "Part-time work protects men from time pressures more than it does women," the report said.
Professor Pocock said employers interested in planning for better economic times should take heed of the results.
"We tend to adopt a 'batten down the hatches' mentality in times of recession when we should be looking at survey results like these and considering how we can build a sustainable workforce for the future," she said. As well as employers, partners and families had to be more flexible.
The study surveyed 2691 Australians, covering part-time and full-time workers and the self-employed.
The results ranked Australia ninth for work-life balance in a group of 32 European countries. This was below Germany and Britain but above France and Italy.
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