Counting Women's Work
CWW teams at NTA Senegal Conference
The 11th Global Workshop of the National Transfer Accounts network featured a half day devoted to research related to the Counting Women's Work project (CWW), an effort within NTA to add gender as an analytical category in the NTA framework, and also to add a satellite set of accounts to NTA called the National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA). National Time Transfer Accounts use time use survey data to measure production and consumption in the "invisible" economy within households, where care and housework services are supplied for no pay, mostly by women. When those services are valued by an imputed market wage, NTTA estimates and NTA estimates can be combined to reveal the total economy. Eight CWW country teams - Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, Vietnam, India, Costa Rica, and Mexico - attended and presented research. The CWW countries are joined by the US, Turkey, and over 15 European countries with estimates following the same methodology. Among CWW members, only the Colombia team was unable to attend.
Several countries gave basic country reports, revealing the empirical patterns of how gender shapes economic activity. All countries exhibit gender specialization - women are spending more time doing unpaid care and housework than men, while men spend more time in market labor than women. The degree of specialization is most acute among women in their late 20s and 30s, for whom child care responsibilities are at their peak. But there is a wide range of experience from country to country, and within countries over time, in how much men and women share the burdens of both market and household production. The usually overlooked household production measured in NTTA is quite large - 15-45% of GDP depending on the country. Many researchers also commented on the potential barrier this household production burden represents to increasing women's labor force participation. CWW researchers point out that policies with the goal of increasing women's labor force participation as a response to population aging and declining working-age populations must address this potential barrier to achieve their targets. Still other research focused on the consumption of unpaid care time and how much investment in children is missed if we do not measure unpaid care time inputs as part of human capital investment in children.
Presentations
- Eugenia Amporfu, Daniel Sakyi, Prince B. Frimpong, Eric Arthur, Jacob Novignon, Measuring the distribution of housework among men and women in Ghana: The NTTA approach, NTA11_20
- Hippolyte d’Albis, Carole Bonnet, Julien Navaux, Jacques Pelletan, Anne Solaz, François‐Charles Wolff, What do we learn about gender inequality using a NTA approach? Some evidence for France, NTA11_22a
- Nguyen Thi Lan Huong, Pham Ngoc Toan, Pham Minh Thu, Counting women's work: The gendered economy in the market and at home, NTA11_24
- Pamela Jiménez Fontana, Gender inequality on the intergenerational flows in Costa Rica, NTA11_23
- Laishram Ladusingh, Wake Up India, Count Women's Work, NTA11_19a
- Oumy Laye, Latif Dramani, Trade-off between labor market and domestic market in Senegal, NTA11_21
- Moses Muriithi, Reuben Mutegi, Germano Mwabu, Labor supply and income of unpaid family workers in Kenya, NTA11_25
- Morné Oosthuizen, Counting women's work in South Africa, NTA11_26
- Estela Rivero, Changes in intrahousehold time transfers in Mexico between 2002 and 2014: What accounts for what?, NTA11_27
- Elisenda Rentería, R.Scandurra, G.Souto, C.Patxot, Intergenerational money and time transfers by gender in Spain: Who are the actual dependents?, NTA11_28
- Estela Rivero, Who says what in time-use data? The reliability of third-party reporting in the case of Mexico, NTA11_29
- Nazli Şahanoğullari, Aylin Seçkin, Patrick Georges, Introducing gender and time use into NTA Turkey, NTA11_31
- Ana Šeme, Lili Vargha, Tanja Istenič, Jože Sambt, The patterns of non-monetary transfers in Europe: a historical NTTA analysis by age and gender, NTA11_30