"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.

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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.

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Winners of the NTA XI Global Workshop Gender Paper Prize

We are pleased to announce the three winners of the Gender Paper Prize at the 11th Global Meeting of the NTA Network, held in Dakar in June 2016. The winning papers are:

• ARBITRAGE MARCHÉ DU TRAVAIL ET MARCHÉ DOMESTIQUE, by Latif Dramani, Oumy Laye, Sene Ndeye Sokhor

• CHALLENGES TO INCREASE FEMALE LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION: GENDER INEQUALITY IN COSTA RICA, by Pamela Jiménez-Fontana

• THE PATTERNS OF NON‑MONETARY TRANSFERS IN EUROPE: A HISTORICAL NTTA ANALYSIS BY AGE AND GENDER, by Ana Šeme, Lili Vargha, Tanja Istenič, Jože Sambt

All three papers are available as NTA Working Papers and can be downloaded from the NTA website. Paper abstracts and direct download links are available below.

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PAPER ABSTRACTS:

ARBITRAGE MARCHÉ DU TRAVAIL ET MARCHÉ DOMESTIQUE, by Latif Dramani, Oumy Laye, Sene Ndeye Sokhor

In search of well-being, families devote much time on domestic activities including cooking, cleaning, laundry, care for children and senior. Yet these various domestic activities, called "domestic production" are not regarded as an income-generating economic activity and are not sufficiently taken into consideration in the national accounts. The work of Stiglitz et al. (2009) highlight the need to measure this domestic production, to be taken into account in the calculation of household living standards. The method of the National Time Transfer Account (NTTA) was used to measure the time spent on domestic activities. The survey ESPS of 2011 allowed to measure the time spent on domestic activities. The results showed that domestic work time is an average of 7 hours per day for women while it is 30 minutes a day for men. The survey showed that in the paid labor market, the level of men participation in the labor market is significantly higher than that of women with 55.2% of active employed men against 34.3% of active employed women. Moreover, the estimation of women's contribution to the creation of wealth has shown that women produce 35% of the labor income against 65% for men in 2011. By contrast, concerning domestic work, women produce 63% of domestic production and men 37% of this production in 2011. These results demonstrate the existence of an implicit arbitration in households for domestic activity and paid work. In a world where time is increasingly monetized, it is interesting to wonder about the future of domestic work in Senegal and in Africa in general.

CHALLENGES TO INCREASE FEMALE LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION: GENDER INEQUALITY IN COSTA RICA, by Pamela Jiménez-Fontana

Costa Rica is at the end of the demographic transition with an insufficient educational profile to meet the demands of the market. The benefits of the first demographic dividend were not materialize due to the lack of public policies that did not promote better skills for the new generations that will have to support an aging population. In this context, a potential opportunity arises: low female labor force participation poses a scope for accelerating economic growth through greater incorporation of women into the market. This opportunity known as gender dividend, only materialize if public policies reduce the barriers that limit a greater female participation. Despite the rapid growth of the participation rate of women in the market, in the last five years a stagnation of this indicator is observed, which suggests that factors such as care and unpaid work limit the participation of women on the market. Gender inequality in Costa Rica is evident: low female political participation, women as the main responsible for care and policies do not encourage parental responsibility. Some efforts such as childcare networks intend to reduce female unpaid work. However, many of these programs have low coverage and also are target only for people on poverty. In this article I analyze gender inequality on market and unpaid production using the methodology developed by international Counting Women's Work and the project National Transfer Accounts. Also, per capita profiles of key domestic activities by age and sex are analyzed.

THE PATTERNS OF NON‑MONETARY TRANSFERS IN EUROPE: A HISTORICAL NTTA ANALYSIS BY AGE AND GENDER, by Ana Šeme, Lili Vargha, Tanja Istenič, Jože Sambt

This paper analyses the age patterns of production, consumption and net transfers in the form of unpaid work by gender and over time. Using National Time Transfer Accounts methodology, we present the historical results for several European countries for the first time. The results show that the evolution of age patterns over time is different for men and women and is highly affected by different demographic trends, as well as by institutional background of countries. We discover that despite differences over time and across countries, two main characteristics of age patterns do not change: transfers of unpaid work still flow, first, from women to men and secondly, from working‑age population mostly to children and to a lesser extent to the elderly.

NTA XI Conference

A number of country teams presented the research they have been conducting as part of the Counting Women's Work project at the 11th Global Meeting of the NTA Network in Dakar and Saly, Senegal, from 20 to 24 June 2016. Presentations included:

• Eugenia Amporfu, D.Sakyi, P.B. Frimpong, E.Arthur, J.Novignon, Measuring the Distribution of Housework among Men and Women in Ghana: The National Time Transfer Accounts Approach

• Nguyen Thi Lan Huong, Pham Ngoc Toan, and Pham Minh Thu, Using National Time Transfer Accounts Approach to Analyse Labor Income Gap by Gender in Vietnam

• Pamela Jiménez Fontana, Gender inequality on the intergenerational flows in Costa Rica

• Laishram Ladusingh, Wake Up India, Count Women's Work

• Oumy Laye and Latif Dramani, Trade off Between Labor Market and Domestic Market in Senegal

• Moses Muriithi, Reuben Mutegi, Germano Mwabu, The Incomes and Labor Supplies of Unpaid Family Workers in Kenya

• Morné Oosthuizen, Counting Women's Work in South Africa

• Estela Rivero, Changes in intrahousehold time transfers in Mexico between 2002 and 2014: What accounts for what?

Other presentations related to Counting Women's Work can be found here. One exciting development of the conference was that the group of West African countries involved in creating demographic dividend observatories would incorporate a gender perspective and time use analyses into those plans.

For more information about the NTA XI conference, please visit the conference site.

Infographic, Senegal

Counting Women’s Work estimates of the market and unpaid care work economies can be summarized with a series of statistics. CWW produces infographics to show these results. Infographics are available with a dark or light background. The infographic for Senegal is shown below.

All infographics are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.