In the City of Buenos Aires, official statistics show that women spend less time than men working for the market (43% women vs. 57% men in 2016), but they spend significantly more time than men on domestic and care work. And this inequality is exacerbated in the most vulnerable sectors: statistics reveal that women belonging to the poorest 20% of the City spend an average of 7 and a half hours per day on care tasks, while women from the poorest 20% wealthy population of Buenos Aires, only 3 hours and 12 minutes on average. It’s almost a working day. Talking about care is talking about the basis of the feminization of poverty.
According to the latest report on Living Conditions of the General Directorate of Statistics and Censuses According to the Government of the City of Buenos Aires (corresponding to the 4th quarter of 2021 for CABA), households headed by women have a poverty rate of 19.0%, compared to 12.2% of households headed by men. In households headed by a person employed in “domestic service” poverty reaches 45.6%. In households inhabited by children under 14 years of age, poverty reaches 26.3% and increases as the number of children in the household increases.
It is not new: care and household chores have always been a structural factor of gender inequality in the economic sphere. We call care tasks all those activities that are essential for people to be able to fully develop their lives, such as eating food, educating themselves, being healthy and living in a suitable habitat. In this sense, care tasks imply an affective, material and economic aspect. The phrase that has already become known “what they call love is unpaid work” represents very well the overload that women have when it comes to care tasks. Under normal conditions, women spend an average of 6.4 hours a day on housework and care. This value represents three times the time spent by men and does not include the hours of work of the staff of private homes.
It is clear that the economy cannot be sustained without care tasks and that is why the task of the State is key to recognizing this inequality. At the end of 2021, the government launched the Registered program, which offered payment of 50% of salary to employers who registered domestic staff for 6 months. The scope was limited: despite the fact that around 56,000 workers were registered as of December 2021, only just over 10,000 benefits were granted out of the 90,000 that the Registered Program aspired to. This data shows us that the core of the care crisis is not just a matter of rules and laws. From employers who question the payment of bonuses or vacations to their domestic staff, to the staff themselves who often do not ask to be registered for fear of losing their jobs, it is clear that the problem has a strong cultural component that we have to think about how reverse.
We need to think about and promote initiatives that allow us to address the issue of care in a comprehensive manner and that do not focus only on the distribution of domestic tasks between men and women within the home or on the registration of domestic staff. But we also know that we cannot make such a profound modification of the patriarchal cultural matrix in which we still live depend only on the State. And paraphrasing that phrase we could also say “what they call the private sphere, is an area regulated economically by the market and culturally by patriarchy.” That is why the contributions of companies and civil society are so important to deconstruct gender stereotypes and end the labor segregation of women.
In the Ombudsman of the City, we organize the cycle of talks “How to solve the care crisis?” in which we debate and reflect on both public initiatives and those of civil society and companies on the issue of care. In order to break the cultural matrix in which care tasks are trapped, the recognition and active participation of the entire society is necessary. Breaking the vicious circle that care tasks create in the professionalization and advancement of equality in the workplace for women is everyone’s task.
Andrea Conde – Office of the Ombudsman of the City of Buenos Aires
Source: Ambito
