Reveal the gender dimension of our economies

This involves two distinct efforts: 

  • Dis-aggregate traditional measures of market-based economic activity by gender, and

  • Integrate measures of non-market unpaid care work, by gender, with traditional measures of market-based economic activity.

Detailed Methods (PDF)

1. Measuring gender in the market-based economy

For the first, CWW builds upon the work of the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) project, which dis-aggregates national measures of economic activity by age to reveal how people produce, consume, share and save across generations.  The NTA methodology is described in detail in a United Nations technical manual.  CWW extends the NTA framework by further dis-aggregating NTA age profiles of economic activity by gender.  The NTA focus on the age dimension is a natural fit for studying the gendered economy because life cycle events such as marriage, household formation, childbearing, and aging are the roots of gendered differentiation in economic activity.

2. Adding non-market unpaid care work

For the second, CWW builds on the long-standing effort to add household production satellite accounts to traditional economic accounting frameworks.  "Household production" includes the unpaid household services that maintain households and care for dependents but are not included in national accounts measures such as GDP.  The OECD reviewed the main features of that methodology, including the challenges of putting it into practice, here.  CWW extends this methodology by applying the NTA framework to household production satellite accounting to produce National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA).  NTTA include production, consumption, and transfers of unpaid care work by age and gender in a way that is directly comparable to market-based measures included in NTA.

Visit the National Transfer Accounts page with example datasets and computer code to calculate NTTA