New Data from CWW in West Africa for 2022!

Counting Women’s Work has released estimates from four more countries, plus a second set of Senegal estimates for an additional year. The other countries are Togo, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, and Mali. The previously released countries are included with the new releases in a complete datafile. Please go to https://www.countingwomenswork.org/data to get the new and improved file.

The new unpaid care work estimates from West Africa are all based on an experimental, condensed time use diary that was included in each country’s Harmonized Survey on Households Living Standards in 2018 (Enquête Harmonisée sur le Conditions de Vie des Ménages, or EHCVM).

We hope to release more countries in 2023.

Unpaid care work and Covid19 - TAKE THE SURVEY

The front door is an important border in the gendered economy. A “traditional” division of labor since industrialization is men working outside the home at market work and women inside the home doing unpaid care and housework. In reality, men and women do both types of work, but in every country for which Counting Women’s Work has estimates, on average men do more market work than women and women do more unpaid care work than men. Will this persist in the face of massive dislocations caused by the coronavirus pandemic? We do not know.

Shelter in place, social distancing, lockdown. Whatever it is called in your area, government orders to slow the spread of the coronavirus have upended daily life for billions. Most of us are being asked to retreat to our households. Will we see the gendered economy differently when it no longer hides behind a door?

Counting Women’s Work has developed a survey to study how paid and unpaid work has changed in this new era. We invite you to take the survey, then share it with family, friends, and colleagues. It gives respondents the chance to be heard about how their household is coping with all kinds of work changes:

• Have you or your spouse or partner lost paid employment? Or is your work considered “essential” and you are working longer hours than ever? Would you rather stay home but cannot afford to go without a paycheck?

• Are you spending more hours on childcare in the face of school and childcare closures?

• Are you doing tasks that you used to purchase from restaurants, housecleaners, or other service providers?

• Is the work in your household being shared more evenly or less?

• What do YOU want to say about work in and out of the household in this new, uncertain time?

The survey is anonymous and participation voluntary. We will publish preliminary results here once 500 responses have been gathered and will continue to update results as the sample size grows. The survey is in English, but CWW would be happy to have collaborators translate the survey instrument and use it in other countries. Feel free to leave comments or questions below, or contact Gretchen Donehower, the Principal Investigator of Counting Women’s Work.

Happy New Year Data from CWW, January, 2020!

To ring in the New Year, Counting Women’s Work has released estimates from four more countries: Mexico, India, Vietnam, and Mauritius. The six previously released countries (Colombia, Ghana, Senegal, South Africa, United States, and Uruguay) are included with the new releases in a complete ten-country datafile. Please go to https://www.countingwomenswork.org/data to get the new and improved file.

We hope to release more countries in the coming months.

CWW Care Work Projection Template at CWE-GAM Meeting

Gretchen Donehower, PI of CWW, participated in the 2019 annual meeting of the Care Work and the Economy Project (CWE-GAM) in Glasgow, Scotland on June 30 - July 2, 2019.

Donehower has been collaborating with CWE-GAM researchers to create a template for projecting the care economy. This involves a synthesis of both paid and unpaid care work for both children and elders, and estimating the age- and sex-specific nature of the production and consumption of care. The data needs are intensive - requiring a time use survey to estimate dynamics in the unpaid care work sector, and income and expenditure surveys to estimate dynamics in the paid care work sector.

Donehower presented presents a preliminary model which projects care support ratios for the United States through 2030. Slides from the meeting are available here. Work is ongoing to apply the model to data available in South Korea, and modify that output based on feedback from the meeting.

Click below to learn more at the project website:

Older people as unpaid care work producers at HelpAge Asia-Pacific Conference

Gretchen Donehower, PI of CWW, participated remotely in the HelpAge Asia-Pacific Regional Conference in Tehran, I.R. Iran, October 23-25, 2018. The focus of the conference, from the conference website, was "Family, Community and State in Ageing Societies - Demographic ageing is having profound impact on societal dynamics in Asia. The functions of the family, communities and governments are changing rapidly. How they can reinforce each other, and how they relate with longer periods of independence in old age, will need to be re-examined.”

Donehower presented research on time transfers in Asian countries, showing that women produce unpaid care work and transfer it to family and community members until the oldest age groups we observe. This means that aging societies have more productive potential than usually considered. It will take the right policies to enhance this potential and ensure the well-being of older persons and aging societies.

The conference paper can be accessed here.

Average time spent working at each age by type of work and sex, hours per week.

CWW at 40th International Association for Time Use Research (IATUR) Conference

The first time Counting Women's Work research was presented to this group of researchers was at the 38th IATUR conference in 2016. The collaboration between CWW researchers and IATUR has grown steadily since that time and several CWW and NTA papers will be presented. View the full program here.

The following papers by CWW and National Transfer Accounts project researchers will be presented at the 40th IATUR conference, to be held in Budapest, Hungary, October 24-26:

• Hyun Kyung Kim, “Development of Korean Household Production Satellite Accounts and Korean National Time Transfer Accounts using Korean Time Use Survey Data”

• Marta Marszałek, “The National Time Transfer Accounts and the Satellite Household Production Account for Poland, Intergenerational economy of women and men”

• Lili Vargha, Gretchen Donehower, “The Quantity-Quality Tradeoff: a Cross-Country Comparison of Unpaid Care Time Investments Per Child in Relation to Fertility”

• Nazli Sahanogullari, Aylin Seckin, “Could Female Labor Household Output Explain Low Labor Force Participation?”

We will link to the papers or presentations after the conference.