Addressing non-paid work
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From housework and homemaking to gardening and local community work, both women and men do so-called “unpaid work” on top of their paid jobs.
But according to the OECD’s report “Cooking, Caring and Volunteering: Unpaid Work Around the World”, women do more unpaid work than men in every country. In fact, they work about an hour more than men in Denmark, and up to five hours more in India. On average across OECD countries, women invest some 150 minutes more of their time in unpaid work than men do.
Unpaid care work enables economies to grow, but unless such workers, and particularly women, are supported, their productive potential is constrained, as is their family’s well-being. According to some critics, until unpaid work is more fully taken on board in economic data, policies that focus on increasing women’s labour market participation may be blunted (see, for instance, “Changing the care-less economy” by Rosalind Eyben, on OECD Insights). Putting a value on unpaid work is not an easy task, and work is under way to address this, not least to measure changes in personal welfare more accurately. The data relate to 2008; it remains to be seen if the crisis has affected these gaps.
Click here for a pdf of the report at OECD iLibrary
©OECD Observer No 284, Q1 2011
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