Time Use and Transfers in the Americas - Producing, Consuming, and Sharing Time Across Generations and Genders

Urdinola, B.P. and Tovar, J.A., 2019. Time Use and Transfers in the Americas. Springer International Publishing.

About this book:

This book provides a comparison of the measurement in time and monetary units of unpaid domestic work in Colombia, Costa Rica, Uruguay, and the Hispanic ethnicity in the United States. A standardized technique allows the development of comparable estimates across countries per age and gender which reveal specific behavioral patterns over the life cycle. A mixture of economic conditions, social norms, and demographic trends provide insightful explanations for the unequal burden that women and girls carry when dealing with unpaid domestic activities, an economically significant but traditionally neglected activity. As such, the book is of interested to practitioners in all social sciences, particularly sociologists, demographers, economists, and policymakers.

CWW Working Paper No. 1

Today we publish a Counting Women's Work Working Paper from Costa Rica. These working papers provide more detailed analysis than the Country Reports and are authored by the CWW country teams.

CWW Working Paper WP1 is by Pamela Jiménez-Fontana and details the CWW research for Costa Rica. It is entitled: Challenges to increase female labor force participation: Gender Inequality in Costa Rica.

Public interest in CWW Costa Rica research

The University of Costa Rica TV Program "Espectro" interviewed CWW Costa Rica team leader Pamela Jiménez Fontana about unpaid work in Costa Rica and other topics covered by National Transfer Accounts and National Time Transfer Accounts. The video also includes a discussion with the Minister of Women's Affairs.

Winners of the NTA XI Global Workshop Gender Paper Prize

We are pleased to announce the three winners of the Gender Paper Prize at the 11th Global Meeting of the NTA Network, held in Dakar in June 2016. The winning papers are:

• ARBITRAGE MARCHÉ DU TRAVAIL ET MARCHÉ DOMESTIQUE, by Latif Dramani, Oumy Laye, Sene Ndeye Sokhor

• CHALLENGES TO INCREASE FEMALE LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION: GENDER INEQUALITY IN COSTA RICA, by Pamela Jiménez-Fontana

• THE PATTERNS OF NON‑MONETARY TRANSFERS IN EUROPE: A HISTORICAL NTTA ANALYSIS BY AGE AND GENDER, by Ana Šeme, Lili Vargha, Tanja Istenič, Jože Sambt

All three papers are available as NTA Working Papers and can be downloaded from the NTA website. Paper abstracts and direct download links are available below.

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PAPER ABSTRACTS:

ARBITRAGE MARCHÉ DU TRAVAIL ET MARCHÉ DOMESTIQUE, by Latif Dramani, Oumy Laye, Sene Ndeye Sokhor

In search of well-being, families devote much time on domestic activities including cooking, cleaning, laundry, care for children and senior. Yet these various domestic activities, called "domestic production" are not regarded as an income-generating economic activity and are not sufficiently taken into consideration in the national accounts. The work of Stiglitz et al. (2009) highlight the need to measure this domestic production, to be taken into account in the calculation of household living standards. The method of the National Time Transfer Account (NTTA) was used to measure the time spent on domestic activities. The survey ESPS of 2011 allowed to measure the time spent on domestic activities. The results showed that domestic work time is an average of 7 hours per day for women while it is 30 minutes a day for men. The survey showed that in the paid labor market, the level of men participation in the labor market is significantly higher than that of women with 55.2% of active employed men against 34.3% of active employed women. Moreover, the estimation of women's contribution to the creation of wealth has shown that women produce 35% of the labor income against 65% for men in 2011. By contrast, concerning domestic work, women produce 63% of domestic production and men 37% of this production in 2011. These results demonstrate the existence of an implicit arbitration in households for domestic activity and paid work. In a world where time is increasingly monetized, it is interesting to wonder about the future of domestic work in Senegal and in Africa in general.

CHALLENGES TO INCREASE FEMALE LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION: GENDER INEQUALITY IN COSTA RICA, by Pamela Jiménez-Fontana

Costa Rica is at the end of the demographic transition with an insufficient educational profile to meet the demands of the market. The benefits of the first demographic dividend were not materialize due to the lack of public policies that did not promote better skills for the new generations that will have to support an aging population. In this context, a potential opportunity arises: low female labor force participation poses a scope for accelerating economic growth through greater incorporation of women into the market. This opportunity known as gender dividend, only materialize if public policies reduce the barriers that limit a greater female participation. Despite the rapid growth of the participation rate of women in the market, in the last five years a stagnation of this indicator is observed, which suggests that factors such as care and unpaid work limit the participation of women on the market. Gender inequality in Costa Rica is evident: low female political participation, women as the main responsible for care and policies do not encourage parental responsibility. Some efforts such as childcare networks intend to reduce female unpaid work. However, many of these programs have low coverage and also are target only for people on poverty. In this article I analyze gender inequality on market and unpaid production using the methodology developed by international Counting Women's Work and the project National Transfer Accounts. Also, per capita profiles of key domestic activities by age and sex are analyzed.

THE PATTERNS OF NON‑MONETARY TRANSFERS IN EUROPE: A HISTORICAL NTTA ANALYSIS BY AGE AND GENDER, by Ana Šeme, Lili Vargha, Tanja Istenič, Jože Sambt

This paper analyses the age patterns of production, consumption and net transfers in the form of unpaid work by gender and over time. Using National Time Transfer Accounts methodology, we present the historical results for several European countries for the first time. The results show that the evolution of age patterns over time is different for men and women and is highly affected by different demographic trends, as well as by institutional background of countries. We discover that despite differences over time and across countries, two main characteristics of age patterns do not change: transfers of unpaid work still flow, first, from women to men and secondly, from working‑age population mostly to children and to a lesser extent to the elderly.

NTA XI Conference

A number of country teams presented the research they have been conducting as part of the Counting Women's Work project at the 11th Global Meeting of the NTA Network in Dakar and Saly, Senegal, from 20 to 24 June 2016. Presentations included:

• Eugenia Amporfu, D.Sakyi, P.B. Frimpong, E.Arthur, J.Novignon, Measuring the Distribution of Housework among Men and Women in Ghana: The National Time Transfer Accounts Approach

• Nguyen Thi Lan Huong, Pham Ngoc Toan, and Pham Minh Thu, Using National Time Transfer Accounts Approach to Analyse Labor Income Gap by Gender in Vietnam

• Pamela Jiménez Fontana, Gender inequality on the intergenerational flows in Costa Rica

• Laishram Ladusingh, Wake Up India, Count Women's Work

• Oumy Laye and Latif Dramani, Trade off Between Labor Market and Domestic Market in Senegal

• Moses Muriithi, Reuben Mutegi, Germano Mwabu, The Incomes and Labor Supplies of Unpaid Family Workers in Kenya

• Morné Oosthuizen, Counting Women's Work in South Africa

• Estela Rivero, Changes in intrahousehold time transfers in Mexico between 2002 and 2014: What accounts for what?

Other presentations related to Counting Women's Work can be found here. One exciting development of the conference was that the group of West African countries involved in creating demographic dividend observatories would incorporate a gender perspective and time use analyses into those plans.

For more information about the NTA XI conference, please visit the conference site.

Retos para materializar el dividendo de género

Jiménez-Fontana, P., 2016. "Retos para materializar el dividendo de género". Revista Población y Salud en Mesoamérica, 13(2).

ABSTRACT:

The gender dividend is a potential opportunity for economic growth due to an increase in women’s participation in the labor market; however, non-remunerated work can be a barrier to increase women’s labor force participation. In order to analyze the relationship between non-remunerated production and the potential gender dividend, this article analyzes time use age profiles, and the non-remunerated production and consumption in Costa Rica. Furthermore, the study estimates a potential unmet demand of childcare. The paper uses the methods developed by the international network National Transfer Accounts. The main results of the study confirm that women are the responsible for household work, while men on average specialize in the labor market. The results show that there is not more co-responsibility between men and women of younger generations. The materialization of the gender dividend depends heavily on public policies that seek to reduce women’s household workload and increase quality jobs opportunities.