"National Time Transfer Accounts: On the gender gap and unpaid work in the Global South" Online Symposium

Led by the Colombia NTA/CWW research team, a group of scholars and practitioners met to share their research and experience in the measurement of unpaid care work in the Global South. The discussions covered specific country results, disaggregated country results, comparative results with a few countries, lessons learned across all of the countries in the project, and a look into the role of national statistical offices in collecting data on unpaid care work and turning it into actionable results.

Speakers and Topics:

• Latif Dramani, U. Thiès/CREG-CREFAT, Senegal. Presented comparative results from Senegal and Burkina Faso, demonstrating size of unpaid care work economy and how large this economy is compared to the market economy. Comparing/contrasting results from the two contries.

• B. Piedad Urdinola, U. Nacional, Colombia. Deep dive into results on unpaid care work from the recently available Colombian Time Use survey of 2016-2017, with results broken down by household structure.

• Jordana Jesus, U. Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. Innovative methodology used to estimate complete set of unpaid work age profiles for Brazil using only one survey item on unpaid housework and imputed care estimates based on regional comparative data.

• Gretchen Donehower, U.C. Berkeley, United States. Overview of cross-country results from CWW and what they mean for policy.

• Juan Daniel Oviedo, National Statistics Office – DANE, Colombia. Described Colombia’s commitment to collecting gender data including high-quality time use surveys, and demonstrated what is learned from such data collection and how it is used by stakeholders including policymakers, researchers, and civil society.

Moderator

• Jorge Tovar, U. de Los Andes, Colombia. Led the discussion into how these estimates can be used, how it shapes the global discussion on unpaid care work, and what the limitations and opportunities are from the research presented.

---

School closures and unpaid care work under Covid19

As the Covid19 pandemic spreads across the globe, many governments are closing schools entirely or replacing in-person education with distance learning that students do from home. In either case, hours a day that children used to spend at school in the care of paid teachers and other school personnel, they instead spend at home with parents and other family members.

With school closures and other large-scale disruptions, there is a clear need for data on how these closures impact unpaid care work and paid work in households. Those data will come when nationally representative time use surveys are fielded again to compare with those from before pandemic-related closures. In the meantime, CWW does have tools to help us estimate the scale of the impact. How much will adults’ unpaid care work increase due to time spent supervising children out of school?

Taking data from Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators, we estimate that students spent 22-26 hours per week in school during months when school is in session, depending on the level of schooling. For high school students, it is less likely that they will require adult supervision so we will estimate their time at only 13 hours per week.  Multiplying these estimates by the total numbers of children of each age by the hours per week estimated for their level of schooling gives us an aggregate amount of time shifted from schools to households.  If we assume that these hours are provided in the same proportion as childcare hours are provided now, we can use CWW’s estimate of childcare production by age and sex to distribute those hours to adults.

The results look like the figure below, for a set of 17 countries in the CWW project. Men are shown in the blue lines, women in the red. 

Hours per day of additional childcare due to school closures, for men in blue, for women in red. Some time may be supervisory and not direct interactive care. (Source: CWW estimates and OECD data on average schooling hours)

The increases fall mostly on women because they provide most of the direct care in these countries.  There is a wide range of potential increases for two reasons: 1. some countries have many children relative to the number of adult caregivers and some countries have fewer, and 2. some countries share caregiving responsibilities more evenly between men and women and more evenly over the age range.  At peak ages for childcare in Bangladesh and Senegal, school closures could result in more than three additional hours per day in childcare. In Spain and Colombia, it could be less than an hour per day.  Of course, this is averaging across parents and non-parents, as CWW estimates are averages across all persons of a particular age and sex.  Further exploration within each country would be needed to find the impact per parent instead of per adult.

---

Time Use, Policy, and Economic Growth Online Symposium

In collaboration with the Population Reference Bureau, the Counting Women’s Work project held an online webcast to explore policy applications of research into time use and unpaid care work. The discussion was policy focused, with the main questions revolving around how estimates like CWW’s National Time Transfer Accounts can impact policy. We were honored to host several speakers who are long-time participants in the Counting Women’s Work project and one chief national statistician who gave his perspective on these important issues from outside the project.

Speakers:

• Morne Oosthuizen, DPRU/ University of Cape Town

• Latif Dramani, CREG-CREFAT

• Beatriz Urdinola Piedad, National University of Colombia-Bogotá

• Juan Daniel Oviedo, National Statistics Office – DANE, Colombia

Moderators

• Gretchen Donehower, Counting Women’s Work

• Marlene Lee, Population Reference Bureau

In preparation for the session, the Population Reference Bureau prepared a fact sheet featuring CWW research in Vietnam, Colombia, and Senegal. The fact sheet features definitions and basic methodology and shows how CWW research helps policymakers understand gender gaps in work and income, as well as how they differ by socioeconomic status, or urban/rural residence.

---

On International Women's Day, count your care with CWW's new web app!

On International Women’s Day, we reflect on how far the world has come in giving women and girls equal opportunities and how far we still have to go. We have made great strides toward gender equality in primary education, property rights, protection under the law, and access to labor markets. Large gender gaps still exist in wages, political representation, wealth, and enforcement of laws on gender equality. One factor behind some of these gaps may be unequal responsibility for unpaid care work.

Counting Women’s Work data shows us how large those gaps are and how they differ by age, country, and region. Click the button below to try our new online app and see how much time YOU spend in unpaid care work compared to people around the world.

While you are counting your work, let’s think about what it means. Is this work valuable? Is it valued? Are we satisfied with how the drudgery and joy is shared by women and men, governments and private markets? The more we count ALL of our work, the more our work counts.

Unpaid care work and the gender dividend in El Salvador

Werner Peña, Adriana Vides, María Elena Rivera, 2020. “Trabajo productivo no remunerado y dividendo de género en El Salvador”. Notas de Población, 109. January 2020. In Spanish.

ABSTRACT:

This article uses National Transfer Accounts (NTAs) and National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTAs) to highlight the contribution made to the economy by unpaid productive work, and to show how this relates to the gender dividend in El Salvador. As NTAs do not record unpaid domestic work or care activities, they underestimate the economic contributions made by those who mostly perform these tasks, namely women. To remedy this omission, NTTAs are used to estimate the production, consumption and time transfer of unpaid production and care work. A hypothetical scenario is configured to estimate the gender dividend that would be obtained from an increase in women’s labour market participation, which would enable El Salvador to exploit the demographic dividend more effectively. It is recommended that ways be found to meet the demand for care resulting from such a scenario.

KIHASA-EWC Conference, December 3, 2019, Seoul, Korea

Members of the Counting Women’s Work and National Transfer Accounts projects presented research at a joint conference in Seoul, hosted by the Korea Institute of Health and Social Welfare (KIHASA) of Korea and the East-West Center (EWC) of the United States.

The theme of the one-day conference is “Challenges and Policy Responses to Population Aging.” Gretchen Donehower, the principal investigator of CWW will speak on unpaid care work, while members of NTA teams from the United States, Korea, Japan, and Spain will discuss what NTA estimates tell us about how aging will impact productivity, consumption, public and private transfer systems, and economic growth, and what policies are available to maximize desirable outcomes.

Web links:

KIHASA: https://www.kihasa.re.kr/english/main.do

EWC: https://www.eastwestcenter.org

NTA: http://www.ntaccounts.org

Donehower draft working paper