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certainly the time dedicated to unpaid care work has only been recognized in recent years. The Inegi presented the results of the National Survey on Time Use (ENUT, 2024), a work carried out in a sample of 32 thousand 48 homes in the country.
“Total work time” is defined as including both work that generates income and work that does not. “Paid or market work” includes work producing goods and providing services for third parties in exchange for payment or benefit. It covers formal work (with a contract and social security) and informal work, the time spent searching for work, business creation and transfers to carry out work. “Unpaid work” includes work producing self-consumption goods, domestic work (food preparation, cleaning, washing, shopping, etc.) and caring for one’s own home and family members (babies, girls, boys and adolescents, dependent elderly people, sick people or those with disabilities), as well as community and volunteer work.
In Mexico, women and men spend a lot of time working, the national average is 59.1 hours per week: women work 61.1 per week and men 58. To unpaid work (domestic, care, community and volunteer work) women dedicate 39.7 hours per week on average, double that of men, who dedicate 18.2 hours to these jobs, so the gap is 21.5 hours.
To domestic work alone, they dedicate an average of 28.2 hours per week and men 11.5; To care work, they dedicate 13.6 hours and they dedicate 8.7, while to voluntary work they dedicate 8 hours per week and they dedicate 5.5; To community work they dedicate 3.7 hours per week and they dedicate 2.6 hours. To market or paid work, women dedicate 9 hours less, 42.2 hours per week, while men dedicate 51.3 hours per week.
The population that speaks indigenous languages (HLI) works many more hours than the non-speakers and the gender gaps are greater: they dedicate 44 hours a week to unpaid work (domestic, care, community and volunteer), to which they dedicate 16.7 hours, a difference of 28 hours; while they dedicate 36 hours to paid work, 11 hours less than the 47.3 hours per week that they dedicate.
In the HLI population, the gap between the sexes in domestic work is worth highlighting: women dedicate 23 hours more, 32.7 hours per week, while men only 9.5 hours per week. HLI women work a total of 80 hours a week and their male counterparts 64.
Among people with disabilities, the differences are also relevant: they dedicate 24.9 hours per week to domestic work, more than double that of men with disabilities, who dedicate 11.7 to these tasks.
Gender gaps at work present great differences in the states. In Chiapas, Veracruz, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Michoacán, Zacatecas, Nayarit, Durango and Sinaloa, women dedicate an average of 24 hours more per week than men to unpaid work (domestic, care, community and volunteer work); In Mexico City and Baja California the gender gap is the smallest with 15 hours on average, the second position is held by Chihuahua, Yucatán and Quintana Roo, places where women dedicate 18 hours more to unpaid work than their male counterparts.
Focusing on care work, the largest gender gaps are recorded in Veracruz, Nuevo León, Campeche and Hidalgo, where women dedicate 6 hours more than men, while in Baja California, Jalisco, Durango and Mexico City, women show smaller gaps, with differences of 3 to 4 hours more than men in care work.
Among the economically active population (EAP), those who dedicate 40 hours per week to paid or market work, they dedicate 23.8 hours (12.7 hours more) to domestic work, while they only dedicate 11.1 hours per week; To care work, EAP women who cover 40 work hours dedicate 8.3 hours and men 5.3 hours.
15.2 percent of women would like to spend less time on domestic work, a wish of 6.4 percent of men. The weekly hours dedicated to using mass media is 15.1 hours for women and 15.7 hours for men. They dedicate 4.7 hours to sports and they dedicate 5.4, while they dedicate 4.1 hours to games and hobbies and they dedicate 6.1 hours per week. Men spend 6.9 percent less time praying, meditating and resting, and 2.5 fewer hours on health care.
Statistics confirm an unequal and unfair distribution of time dedicated to work, a topic of public interest, since gender labor gaps are a structural brake for the country’s economy, for social mobility and for the autonomy and growth of women, and to a lesser extent for the social mobility of men. Mexicans resist collaborating more in domestic and care tasks, to which bosses and employers contribute by not making working hours more flexible or reducing them or improving the salaries of male and female workers.
* Conapo technical secretary
