Women's Economic Activity and Gender Dividends

Economic activity is heavily gender-determined, leading to large differences in labor income, based on different labor force participation but also, different wages. What “gender dividend” might we get in the future from closing some of the gaps?​

This was the theme of a presentation by Gretchen Donehower, Project Director for Counting Women’s Work, at the “Workshop on the Demographic Dividend”, International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) 2016, held in Nusa Dua, Indonesia, on 25th January 2016.

Gretchen, based at the University of California at Berkeley, discussed how a demographic dividend is impacted by long-term demographic change and changing gender roles are a key set of links in this chain. 

Click here to view the full slide deck.

Radio Canada interviews CWW researcher

Estela Rivero (right) spoke to Pablo Gómez Barrios of Radio International Canada in September 2014.

In Mexico, the economic crisis of the 1980s propelled many women into the labour market. However, women are more likely to be located in the lowest paid jobs and, as a result, their contribution to the country's economy appears to be lower than that of men. 

As in other countries around the world, though, Mexican women continue to perform substantial amounts of work in the home, including cooking, cleaning and care work, even if they are employed outside of the home. These activities are not recorded as part of the national economy in conventional measures of economic production (e.g. they are not included in GDP), but represent an important contribution to their households' welfare. 

Pablo Gómez Barrios spoke with Estela Rivero, Counting Women's Work researcher for Mexico. 

Click here for the full interview.

Latin America Launch

The Counting Women's Work Project was formally launched in Latin America in Lima, Peru, on Friday 15 August 2014. The launch included a panel discussion entitled "What is the role of women in the labour market today? Challenges in Peru and Latin America" and was hosted by the CIES, in association with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and CWW funders the Hewlett Foundation and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

Participants in the discussion included Paulo Saad (Head of Population and Development, CELADE); Estela Rivero (principal investigator for the Mexican CWW research); Carolina Trivelli (former Minister of Development and Social Inclusion in Peru); and Guiselle Romero (researcher in the Department of Management Sciences, PUCP). The discussion was led Norma Vidal Añaños, Deputy Minister for Social Services, Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion.

Download the presentations (in Spanish):

• Paulo Saad: "Participación laboral femenina y bono de género en América Latina"

• Estela Rivero: "La importancia de contrar el trabajo de la mujer en América Latina"

Africa Launch Event

Many important economic and policy questions focus on gender. Are families and governments investing equally in girls and boys? How do men and women contribute to the economy? What policies are needed to address gender discrimination in the home and the workplace?

The Counting Women’s Work (CWW) project, a world-wide research project designed to address these and other issues, was launched on May 15, 2014 at an event in Cape Town, South Africa. The project is part of the National Transfer Accounts research network, which has revealed how we produce, consume, share and save by age in countries around the world. Video of the event appears below.

The CWW project was formed to add gender to our understanding of the generational economy and to address a major flaw in economic accounting: national accounts include only market production, omitting unpaid household and care work often done by women and girls. The CWW project has therefore developed methodology to estimate economic flows for unpaid household and care work allowing us to conceptualise and estimate transfers of time as well as money.

Beginning in 2014, CWW has brought together researchers from countries around the world, including at least 6 African countries, to compile comprehensive estimates of the generational economy disaggregated by gender, including the value of unpaid time. Country-specific and comparative results will be extremely useful in formulating and evaluating policies aimed at reducing inequalities typically suffered by women and girls.

The Development Policy Research Unit at the University of Cape Town hosted African country research teams from Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and South Africa at the launch of the Counting Women’s Work research in Africa.

Download event flyer here. 

“Mucho macho,” “poco” women: Counting women’s work in Mexico

Anairis Hernandez and Estela Rivero, getting ready to begin the Counting Women’s Work project in Mexico

by Anairis Hernandez and Estela Rivero

In Mexico, the economic crisis of the 1980s propelled many women who never worked before to join the labour force. Mexican women are twice as likely to participate in labour markets than their grandmothers. However, just less than half of Mexican women are part of the labour force. They tend to have lower ranking occupations; and their hourly earnings remain below those of men. So it is unsurprising that women’s economic contribution is lower than men’s. But this assessment misses productive activities that women perform at home such as cooking and caring for children and the elderly. These household activities bring multiple health, income, and education benefits to all family members. Mexican men—and their counterparts in other countries—spend on average a mere 2.5 hours a day in household chores, about half the time women do.

Women’s economic empowerment has now become a priority both for the Mexican government and for international agencies working in Mexico. In addition, Mexico’s National Population Council aims to focus on the multiple effects of population ageing and the changing structure of Mexican families today. The National Plan of Action 2013-2018 states explicitly that one of the objectives of the current Mexican administration is gender equality. As President Peña Nieto started his government in 2012, Ministries and State dependencies are now drafting their own action plans for the next five-year period. All these developments make the project timely and relevant for Mexico.

Under the project “Counting Women’s Work” funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the IDRC and which started in January 2014, the Mexican team will examine how much of women’s work goes unnoticed in the economy, how much this has changed in the last decade, and why. Evidence shows that both household responsibilities and education levels are associated with how individuals use their time. The researchers will help identify target groups for direct policy interventions, such as groups with specific schooling, and women with and without children. Some of the researchers’ previous work is to appear in the upcoming book "Uso del tiempo y trabajo no remunerado en México" (Time Use and Non-paid work in Mexico), published by El Colegio de México and UNWomen. The lead researchers in the project are Dr. Estela Rivero, a Princeton University graduate and professor at El Colegio de Mexico, and Ms. Anairis Hernandez, who recently graduated from the master's in demography at El Colegio. They will use the methodology proposed by the National Transfer Accounts, funded by IDRC and other donors. Sex-disaggregated data, time transfers and non-market labour permit to build National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA), as they are now known. These new accounts provide an excellent framework to analyse gender issues within the mainstream economic measures.

Other countries represented in the project are also in Latin America (Costa Rica and Colombia), as well as in Asia (India and Vietnam), and Africa (Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and South Africa). The project is led and coordinated by Dr. Gretchen Donehower at University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A. and Morné Oosthuizen at University of Cape Town, South Africa.