The Specialist in Gender and Employment Policies of the International Labor Organization (ILO), Valeria Esquivel, affirmed that “the measurement of the use of time is the painting of what the economy really is”.
The specialist thus referred to the definitive results of the first National Survey of Time Use (ENUT 2021), released last week by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (Indec).
“We are used to the economy being what is traded in the market, which has a price. And in terms of time, this is the total picture. People live in society, children go to school, adults are cared for, with the sum of paid jobs and unpaid jobs. We don’t see them, but when we see them, if we remove them we don’t work, and at some point, this is something that feminist economics has been saying for a long time”, Esquivel told Telam.
Valeria Esquivel is a feminist economist and designed and coordinated the Time Use Survey of the City of Buenos Aires in 2005the first antecedent that our country has in the use of this type of instrument.
The ILO specialist explained that time use surveys received a very special boost from the Beijing Platform for Action, which emerged from the Fourth World Conference on Women held in 1995, “when it was understood that countries committed to measuring unpaid care and domestic work, and the only way to reasonably measure it is through time-use surveys.
Background
Prior to the first ENUT 2021, other experiences were carried out such as the Survey on Time Use and Volunteering in the city of Rosario (2010) and the Time Use Survey in CABAwhich was held again in 2016.
Another precedent occurred in 2013, when the Indec annexed a module on time use and unpaid work in the Annual Survey of Urban Households (EAHU).
Esquivel said that the results of the ENUT 2021 “will allow this information to be related to public policies, because that is a very important dimension. It will allow us to think and design policies while understanding some particular features and some that are similar in other countries, which are really behind many of the gender inequalities that we see, particularly in the labor market”.
The ENUT 2021 highlighted “the very long working hours that those of us who work for pay have”highlighted the feminist economist when analyzing the number of hours dedicated by men (9.06 hours) and women (7.34 hours) to work in the occupation (paid work).
“There is a kind of compensation between domestic work and income. For this reason, in women, domestic work decreases when education increases and let’s suppose income increases because you can buy substitutes”
“This comes into tension with the possibility of providing care, but even women (who are) busy care for 5 hours a day on average. We are talking about averages for the entire population aged 14 or older, so when you have those averages, they are very high in international comparison”, analyzed the specialist in Gender and Employment Policies of the Department of Employment Policies of the ILO.
Based on survey resultsthe occupation condition did not alter the fact that it is women who dedicate more time to unpaid tasks: while unemployed/inactive men performed an average of just over 4 hours of unpaid work per day, employed women they did it 5.39 hours per day.
“One of the consequences of this is the poverty of time and it is going to be necessary to make measurements on the relationship between these very high working hours and wages on the one hand and on the other, the burdens of care are so important that even men have 3 and a half hours, it is more than the average in the world. What happens is that after women double the average, “said Esquivel.
In Argentina, the social organization of care depends mainly on unpaid work carried out within households, and within these it falls, to a greater extent, on women.
In turn, the possibility of acquiring care services in the market is stratified according to different socioeconomic levels.
“There is a sort of trade-off between domestic work and income. That is why, for women, domestic work goes down when education goes up and let’s say income goes up because you can buy substitutes, on the contrary, the less income you have, the less chance you have to buy substitutes”, contrasted the specialist.
“In the extreme, women from poor households who are not in the labor market are because ‘it doesn’t pay’ – in quotes – to be in the labor market if you don’t have a way to replace all that care you are providing,” Esquivel analyzed.
“Women from poor households who are not in the labor market is because ‘it doesn’t pay’ -in quotes- to be in the labor market if you don’t have a way to replace all that care you are providing”
In this way, The economist considered it necessary to carry out a series of more detailed analyzes that cross the results with data on income levels and poverty (and time poverty), since “the most interesting thing is that this shows you the impact that providing quality care services would have and the distributive impact that it would have on certain sectors of the population that today compensate for this with their own work.”
ENUT 2021 realized that 4 out of 10 homes in the country have a population that requires care. In the total number of households with a population seeking care, those with only girls and boys up to 13 years of age in their composition represent 8 out of 10 (84.3% of the total).
It also reflected that with regard to the supply of care, the institutions in charge of providing these services are the family, the State, the market and the community.
Also, The results showed that almost all (98.6%) of the households with a population that needs care resolve it through the unpaid work of a person from the household itself or of relatives residing in other households.
While those who can contract domestic and care services in the market (through their remuneration) represent less than 1 in 10 of the households that demand care (8.9%).
Based on the survey results, the State and the community presented a very low incidence in the provision of care servicesbecause educational institutions, both public and private, were not considered as effectors of care.
Esquivel marked a counterpoint with this methodological decision since “care services are education and health, so do not put education here and say that the State participates in 1%, I do not agree with that, and international comparisons are not They have done so.”
“I believe that the educational system is very important and that considering the role of the educational system and the expansion and universalization of 5, 4, 3 years is for me the bet, so it seems very strange to me. I would not have made the decision methodological approach to exclude the education system, because it seems to me that it does both, educates and provides care,” said the ILO specialist.
