UNPAID CARE AND DOMESTIC WORK
Time for Change: Advancing Gender Equality Through Time-Use Surveys
by
Tawheeda Wahabzada and Lorenz Noe
21 February 2024
The COVID-19 pandemic and other global crises have shed light on the importance of understanding unpaid care work, a topic that is often overlooked or overshadowed. According to UN Women, women averaged a decade of unpaid care and domestic work over a lifetime before the pandemic, compared to just four years for men. During the pandemic, women faced more burden of unpaid care responsibilities resulting from school and other closures.
These heightened responsibilities lead to a ripple effect, which impacts women’s economic empowerment, along with their agency and access to health services and educational opportunities. While we know that women are disproportionately impacted because of unpaid care work, there is a pressing need to consistently measure the status of unpaid care work to be able to make better decisions to protect women’s agency. This means collecting data on a regular basis, such as carrying out time use surveys or integrating a time use module into existing household and labor force surveys.
Despite the benefits for policy, countries lack time-use data.
Examining how women allocate their time to unpaid work and addressing the existing imbalance is a crucial aspect of the broader global efforts toward measuring, monitoring and achieving gender equality: The SDG framework includes one indicator on time use (SDG 5.4.1 on Proportion of time spent on unpaid domestic and care work, by sex, age and location) and the Minimum Set of Gender Indicators includes two indicators using time use surveys (Average number of hours spent on total work (paid and unpaid), by sex and Average number of hours spent on unpaid domestic and care work, by sex, age and location), the latter of which provides the basis for SDG 5.4.1.
Between 2013 and 2022, the most recent ten years of data, the SDG indicator only had information for 49 countries and the Minimum Set indicator on total work only had information -for 41. In light of these shortfalls, the recently launched Gender Data Compass provides a comprehensive view of gender data systems and can be a useful tool in understanding the state of time use surveys and points the way to possible improvements.
The Gender Data Compass has five cardinal points to direct attention toward data availability, data openness, institutional foundations, technical and statistical capacity, and financing. When it comes to the availability and openness of time use data found in national databases and SDG portals, the Gender Data Compass reveals that 73 percent of the 185 countries assessed do not publish data on time spent on unpaid domestic and care work, broadly in line with the availability of data in international databases. This finding is confirmed by the fact that almost the exact same share of countries did not register a time use survey between 2013 and 2022.
Understanding country capacity to fill time-use data gaps.
In addition to identifying existing gaps, the challenges in closing them must also be acknowledged. Conducting a stand-alone time use survey is costly. For example, the total cost for Uganda’s 2017 time use survey was $252,151 US, and the total cost for Morocco’s 2011/12 time use survey was $1,224,722 US. Currently Paraguay is mobilizing domestic resources for their upcoming time survey and have attached a price tag of $600,000 US for the exercise. As many national statistical offices face increasingly constrained budgets, the regular conduct of time use surveys for most countries requires heightened financial backing from both domestic and external sources.
Unfortunately, the picture of external financing for time use surveys is not very clear. Existing data from PARIS21’s PRESS indicates only five projects that mention time use as part of their program name or their objectives for the project since 2011. The three projects that explicitly fund either a time use survey or workshops analyzing time use data and how to conduct a time use survey only amount to a couple of thousand dollars in support, when we know the costs for stand-alone surveys is much higher.
To address these greater financial burdens, one solution is to integrate time use modules into existing household surveys. For example, countries such as Tanzania and Brazil have time use modules integrated in their household budget surveys. This approach not only streamlines costs by leveraging existing data collection efforts but also enhances the comparability of essential data regarding time use and women’s incomes, as in the case of Tanzania’s Household Budget Survey 2017-2018. In addition to a country’s domestic strategies to enhance time use data collection, the international community can contribute through providing financial and technical assistance to whichever modality a country employs.
Raising the profile of time-use surveys on the global stage.
A data instrument that only encompasses a quarter of countries falls short of providing a comprehensive, universal perspective on the state of time use by women and men. Better political prioritization and concurrent funding will be needed to improve the availability of these key data. To assist with the political prioritization piece of this conversation, we are pleased to host a side event during the upcoming UN Statistical Commission together with the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, UN Statistics Division, UN Women, and Colombia’s National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE). The UN Statistical Commission also marks the launch of the updated Guide to Producing Statistics on Time Use, which will support countries in collecting time-use data. We look forward to hearing from country representatives on how they are ensuring time use surveys are included in their work program so that time use is measured accurately and inclusively.
