Policy Forum on Counting Women's Work in Vietnam

Unpaid care and domestic work are vital for people’s well-being and the functioning of the market economy. Globally, the burden of combining productive and reproductive work has negative consequences on women’s lives, including limiting economic opportunities and power within households. Since these activities are ignored in the System of National Accounts and measures of total production such as GDP, no economic value is attached to unpaid household services despite their tremendous contribution to the economy and society.

One of the key targets of the Sustainable Development Goal 5 is to “recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibilities within the household and the family as nationally appropriate”. Vietnam’s National Strategy for Gender Equality 2011-2020 includes a target to reduce women’s time involvement in household duties under its objective to ensure gender equality in family life.

As part of the Counting Women’s Work (CWW) research, funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Vietnam’s research team is engaging with this issue. The CWW research in Vietnam has been carried out by the the Institute of Labour Science and Social Affairs. The findings and policy recommendations emanating from this research were discussed with a variety of stakeholders at a workshop held in Hanoi, Vietnam, on 23 May 2017.

IDRC report on forum IDRC report on forum

PI Donehower’s presentation slides

CWW Country Report, Vietnam

CWW country reports provide an overview of the estimates for that country. These include age profiles of market labor income and consumption by sex from National Transfer Accounts. To include unpaid care work, consumption and production from National Time Transfer Accounts are included as well. The third country report published is from Vietnam. Please click the link below to view the report.

Infographic, Vietnam

Counting Women’s Work estimates of the market and unpaid care work economies can be summarized with a series of statistics. CWW produces infographics to show these results. Infographics are available with a dark or light background. The infographic for Vietnam is shown below.

All infographics are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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.