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.

CWW Collaborates with Care Work and the Economy Project

Researchers from CWW, including Principal Investigator Gretchen Donehower, Project Coordinator Morné Oosthuizen, and CWW Ghana research team leader Professor Eugenia Amporfu will join the 2018 annual meeting of the Care Work and the Economy Project (CWE-GAM) in Berlin, Germany in October 21-23, 2018.

The CWE-GAM project has three main aims:

1. To develop innovative tools to measure and model care,

2. To develop gender-aware macromodels (GAM) that integrate gender and care work into the applied economic tools at the heart of economic policymaking, and

3. To rethink macroeconomic models so that they include gender and unpaid care work as essential elements of understanding economies in a more complete way for more accurate understanding and policy analysis.

Given CWW’s focus on measurement as well as our global reach, collaboration with CWE-GAM is a natural fit. Donehower, Oosthuizen, and Amporfu will attend the meetings, provide feedback on project plans and outputs, and discuss possibilities for further collaboration in the future.

Click below to learn more at the project website:

CWW Policy Brief No. 1

The first publication in the Counting Women’s Work working paper series focuses on results across a diverse group of countries in the “global south.” The analysis demonstrates that unpaid care work is a huge part of economic activity in these countries. Recognizing and understanding this vast but usually ignored sector of the economy has implications for policies related to labor force participation, girls’ education, family policy, and human capital investment.

CWW Policy Brief No. 1 is entitled How “Counting Women’s Work” Matters: Evidence from the Global South and can be downloaded below.

CWW Research in Second National Transfer Accounts project Bulletin

Counting Women's Work was created in part to bring a gender perspective to the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) project, which produces a series of short bulletins showcasing project results and significance for policy. CWW research has been the focus of two bulletins, the second published in March 2018. NTA Bulletin No. 13. reveals the vast amount of economic activity that is “invisible” because unpaid care work not usually counted as part of the economy despite its central role in producing the market labor force of the future and sustaining social welfare. The bulletin argues for the necessity of more and better data on time use and unpaid care work to improve many economic, family, and social policy.

Download NTA Bulletin No. 13 from the NTA website.

CWW/NTA Research Wins Conference Poster Award at IUSSP 2017

Tanja Istenic of the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Economics, and Gretchen Donehower of UC Berkeley Department of Demography with the winning poster of Day 4.

"Is it men or women who pay for the kids? The gendered division in the contributions to childbearing and implications for fertility" was a poster that showcased CWW research methods and their ability to bring new insights by combining the economies of the market and the household. The poster was authored by Lili Vargha of the Hungarian Demographic Research Institute, Gretchen Donehower of UC Berkeley and Tanja Istenic of the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Economics. It was presented at the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population’s (IUSSP) 28th international conference, held in Cape Town, South Africa, on October 29 to November 4, 2017.

It was awarded the Best Poster Prize for Day 4.