Women spend twice as much time as men on care tasks, experts point out

Carolina Gomez Mena

Newspaper La Jornada
Monday December 5, 2022, p. eleven

Women dedicate 268 minutes per day to unpaid care tasks, while men only spend 155 minutes on these tasks; that is to say, they spend almost double the time in these tasks. This was one of the aspects of inequality that the pandemic revealed.

Likewise, more than 600 million women cannot have a paid job because they have to dedicate themselves to care, compared to only 41 million men, academics and feminists exposed at the international seminar The State and society in the face of care.

Tamara Martínez, coordinator for gender equality at UNAM, said that they must expand the dialogues on the structure of the sexual division of labor, reproductive work, unpaid work, as well as the structural inequalities that are sustained from feminization, lack of recognition and the precariousness of the lives of those who perform care work, and that we are mainly women.

Patricia Galeana, founding president of the Mexican Federation of University Women, explained that in Latin American countries women with children have a 54 percent chance of getting a job, while men with children are twice as likely.

Martínez added that the debates on care have put on the table the need for a change in value systems and added that For decades, different aspects of feminism have fought for tasks and care, especially those that are carried out unpaid in homes or in intimate relationships, to be understood as work, with all the consequences that this implies. : legal recognition, access to labor rights and even remunerations.

In addition, at the launch of the Men for Equality call, Mario Lugo Bonillas, campaign coordinator for UN Women, highlighted the importance of involving men, boys and young people in work for equality and in which there are non-violent and co-responsible positive masculinities.