Asia Training Workshop

The Counting Women's Work training workshop for Asian teams was held at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawai'i, from 14 to 17 July 2014. Asian CWW country teams, as well as other country teams interested in the CWW research, attended, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Slides used in the workshop are linked below.

Lecture Slides:

01 Orientation

02 NTA by Sex

03 NTTA Production in Time Units

04 Imputing Wages to NTTA Production

05 NTTA Consumption

Other Resources:

Time Consumption Profile Example Spreadsheet

Example do file for Senegalese data

Africa Training Workshop

The first CWW training session took place from 12 to 16 May 2014 at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. This training workshop brought together the various African country teams participating in the Counting Women's Work research, namely Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and South Africa.

Programme

Download the programme here. The slide decks from that training are posted below.

Lecture Slides:

01 Orientation

02 NTA by Sex

03 NTTA Production in Time Units

04 Imputing Wages to NTTA Production

05 NTTA Consumption

06 Communicating Results to Policymakers and Exercise

Saldru Seminar

Part of this workshop included a presentation as part of the SALDRU seminar series.  SALDRU is the South African Labor and Development Research Unit, a part of the Department of Economics at the University of Cape Town.  The slides from that presentation are available below.

NTA and CWW

Research in Brief: The Age Profile of Invisible Transfers

These one-pagers summarise key findings of research on gender, time-use and National Transfer Accounts.

Paper Authors: Róbert I. Gál, Endre Szabó and ​Lili Vargha

Publication Date: May 2014

Abstract: We argue that the institutional composition of funding consumption in the two dependent sections of the lifecycle, childhood and old age, are different. To put it sharply, children are raised by their parents, the elderly rely on society. Since the reallocation of resources within households are not registered in National Accounts, the majority of the resources transferred to children are not visible in contrast to resources flowing to the elderly, which are almost entirely observed in public statistics. For our analysis we apply a recent extension of National Accounts, called the National Transfer Accounts, which include intrahousehold transfers; and a further, experimental extension, the National Time Transfer Accounts, which quantifies the value of time transferred among household members in the form of unpaid household labor. We show that about one third of the full transfer package flowing to children is registered in the National Accounts and another roughly one third is made visible by the National Transfer Accounts. The remaining one third, which is the value of parents caring for their children, is made visible by the National Time Transfer Accounts. The corresponding shares in funding old age are quite different: nearly 90 percent is observed in public statistics and the two accounting extensions unfold only a bit more than 10 percent.

The original working paper to which this Research in Brief corresponds can be obtained from the Hungarian Demographic Research Institute here. 

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.

Gender Accounting of Consumption and the Life-cycle Deficit for India

Laishram, L., 2013. "Gender Accounting of Consumption and the Life-cycle Deficit for India". Asia-Pacific Population Journal, 28(2) 27-49.

ABSTRACT:

Life-cycle deficits for women and men in India at different stages of the life cycle are examined in the present paper. Disaggregating life- cycle deficits according to sex, which is termed gender accounting, is important for gender-based budgeting, as it helps Governments allocate funds according to gender needs. A Life-cycle deficit is the difference between income and consumption at different stages of the life cycle. The significance of the paper lies in its contribution to understanding the male-female differential in public and private expenditure on health care, education, and other goods and services in monetary terms and life-cycle deficit. The author finds that, overall, women have a life- cycle deficit, largely due to their lower rates of participation in the paid workforce. However, women perform a large amount of unpaid labour; thus, their life-cycle deficit could turn into a surplus if a monetary value were placed on unpaid labour. However, it is also shown in the present paper that consumption on health-care needs is higher for males in childhood as well as in old age, which can be partly attributed to the discriminatory sociocultural practices that are prevalent in India. As regards education, households tend to spend more on male education than on female education after the age of 15, which is the age at which free-of-charge public education ends.

The author concludes that gender accounting needs to be strengthened so as to allow Governments to allocate funds in order to promote gender equality and empower women. The author also recommends that, in order to achieve gender equality, public funding of health care is not enough. More needs to be done to remove the sociocultural barriers to the use of public services, such as health services.