WOMEN’S PAID AND UNPAID CARE WORK AND TIME-USE SURVEY DATA

Decent work for both men and women have been promoted by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) for several years along with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Recently, a special attention on the care work and care jobs for the future of decent work has become intensified because such care work, both paid and unpaid, is at the heart of humanity and our societies and critical to the economies (ILO, 2018). Women’s work differs from men’s as women are more likely to be unpaid for their work in family, and women are primarily responsible for household and caring tasks including child care and elderly care. Such combined responsibilities to contribute to their family enterprises, earn income in typically low-paid jobs, and care for the household can negatively affect women’s physical and mental well-being.

The surveys, data, research and analysis are all needed to provide insights into to those care work and policy agenda towards achieving good quality care work cannot be detached from gender inequality and the involvements of various stake holders including workers, employers, care givers and care recipients.
Studies on unpaid care work distribution among household members could be extraordinarily difficult without knowing how people allocate their time in such duties. The needs for data on time use are therefore utmost important. In recent years, time-use surveys and statistics have gained importance among policymakers for their usefulness in measuring dimensions of gender equality and human well-being. Time-use surveys can highlight the unequal distribution of unpaid work between women and men, as well as help to understand the contribution of unpaid work to the national economy. When the data collected are analyzed as evidence, it opens up policy dialogues towards a fair distribution of household and care-related tasks between women and men.

This focus is relevant for a number of reasons including the variety in time-use survey status in different countries across the region. Despite the recognition of their utility, time-use surveys are not integrated into national statistical systems, and fewer countries do implement time-use surveys. For example, time use surveys have been conducted regularly over the last decades in developed countries such as the United States, Finland, Japan, Australia and New Zealand to gather comprehensive information on household time allocation. In East Asia, developing and emerging economies are also moving forwards in recent years to obtained high-quality information. For example, in India the first one was conducted around 20 years ago during 1998-1999 and the latest one was during 2019; China’s first-time use survey was just recently in 2008, followed by a more recent wave in 2018. Meanwhile, South Korea and Japan are more advanced taking time use survey into the mainstream surveys. That said the extent or the status of the time use survey is also varied across countries. China, India and Thailand share the same importance in putting the surveys large scale and at the national level using time diary. Meanwhile, other countries in the region such as Lao PDR, Cambodia, Malaysia and Vietnam only use national modular time use survey. Some countries even have no TU survey at all (like Singapore, Myanmar) or at a pilot state (the Philippines).

With this background information in mind and the objectives of creating some follow-up activities from our Asia Convening in Hanoi last August, this activity will be part of our Gender and Economics WG’s 2020 agenda. The first webinar of the series on “Women’s paid and unpaid care work and time-use survey data” will be held on the 5th March. Our speaker will be Associate Professor Dr. Yumiko Yamamoto from the University of Okayama, Japan who is going deliver a talk on women’s paid and unpaid care work in the Asia Pacific.

Participants of the webinar may find some of the following reading references useful for discussion:
https://www.asia-pacific.undp.org/content/rbap/en/home/library/gender-equality/now-is-the-time.html
https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—asia/—ro-bangkok/documents/publication/wcms_630892.pdf
https://www.unescap.org/publications/asia-pacific-population-journal-volume-31-no-1-july-2016

We look forward for your participation.