This is how the time devoted by women to unpaid activities translates into longer daily working hoursknown as double (and even triple) working hours: paid work, unpaid domestic work and, in some cases, community work is also added.
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Courtesy: 8digital
In our country, 76% of unpaid domestic work is done by womenwho spend on average 6.4 daily hours to these tasks, compared to the 3.4 hours spent by men. The data comes from the Survey on Unpaid Work and Use of Time (ENUT) of 2013, since the final results of the last ENUT carried out in 2021 are not yet available.
However, according to preliminary results, the situation does not seem to have changed much in the last nine years: 9 out of 10 women continue to do unpaid domestic workwhile in the case of men they do not reach 7 out of 10.
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Photo: Pixabay
During the pandemic, the unequal distribution of housework was made visible as well as increased. Grow, gender and work conducted an online survey (2020) to learn about the changes in the distribution of tasks within households in the context of the pandemic. On average, women spent almost 10 and a half hours a day to unpaid care and domestic tasks, while men spent a little less than 7 hours.
The unequal distribution of unpaid tasks entails serious difficulties for women in terms of reconciliation of work and home lifemainly in cases where these tasks are not outsourced to other women through payment for their services.
“In other women” since the 96.5% of those who work in private homes are women and do so in conditions of extreme informality and job insecurityaccording to an ILO report published in 2020.
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In this way, the difficulties in reconciling work and home life translate into inequality of opportunities, discrimination and gender gaps within the job market. Many women must Leave the market, reduce their hours or work in worse conditions than men, hindering their professional development.
This situation also reduces the possibilities of dedicating time to other training and leisure activitiesas well as to break.
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The economic system is sustained thanks to the network of care and domestic tasks that are currently carried out disproportionately by women: estimated to represent the 16% of GDP Argentinianaccording to 2020 data from the Department of Economy, Equality and Gender.
This is why at Grow, gender and work we believe that it is necessary to promote a new social organization of care to arrive at a distribution fairer and more equitable between the different social actors: families, market, community and State.
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In this line, the creation of a comprehensive and federal system of care with a gender perspectiveas well as the modification of the regime of licenses for pregnant, non-pregnant and adoptive people, it would imply an advance in the subject.
By Camila Pereyra de la Sovera, communication and IR analyst at Grow, gender and work.-
Source: Ambito
