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.

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 Takes Part in G20 Task Force on Gender Economic Equity

While Argentina holds the Presidency of the G20, or “Group of Twenty,” Argentinian officials and researchers have been coordinating several task forces to ensure that a diverse set of issues and viewpoints are represented in the talks. They call this effort the “Think 20” or “T20” group of task forces and the list of all topics appears here.

Counting Women’s Work was invited to be part of the task force on Gender Economic Equality and the project was represented by Mexico CWW team leader Estela Rivero Fuentes. Dr. Rivero Fuentes used CWW research to highlight the role of unpaid care work in creating gender inequality in access to market labor force opportunities. In addition, she was a contributing author to the Task Force’s volume on Gender Economic Equity: An Imperative for the G20. This represents one of the highest-level policy interactions for CWW.

After a meeting of the task force in September 2018, the T20 produced a comprehensive document that covers the current empirical reality of gendered economies around the world, as well as a set of specific policy recommendations that will be presented during the G20 summit in Buenos Aires in November 2018. This will be the first G20 summit held in South America.

CWW Colombia interviewed

Team members of Counting Women’s Work Colombia discussed their work on UN Radio, an online radio for the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Listen here.