Time Use Studies and Unpaid Care Work

Debbie Budlender

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136932229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Across the world, unpaid care work - unpaid housework, care of persons, and "volunteer" work - is done predominantly by women. This book presents and compares unpaid care work patterns in seven different countries. It analyzes data drawn from large-scale time use surveys carried out under the auspices of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). With its in-depth concentration on time use patterns in developing nations, this book will offer many new insights for scholars of gender and care.

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What do Time Use Studies Tell Us about Unpaid Care Work?

Evidence from Seven Countries

Debbie Budlender

INTRODUCTION

Unpaid care work—the housework and care of persons that occurs in homes and communities of all societies on an unpaid basis—is an area that has generally been neglected by economists, as well as by many development actors. This neglect is evident across virtually all schools of economics, whether neoclassical, political economy or Marxist. Yet the amount of unpaid care work done, the way that the burden of the work is distributed across different actors, and the proportion and kinds of care work that are unpaid or paid have important implications for the well-being of individuals and house-holds, as well as for the economic growth and well-being of nations.

The bulk of unpaid care work across all economies and cultures is performed by women. It is therefore not all that surprising that feminist economists have led the call for unpaid care work to be “counted” in statistics, “accounted for” in representations of the economy, and “taken into account” in policy making (Elson 2000:21). It is also feminists who have argued that theorizing and research into welfare states and regimes need to have gender as a central focus (see Razavi 2007 for a summary of this literature).

Like the general literature on welfare states and regimes, much of the feminist work on this topic has, until now, focused on more developed countries. Similarly, until fairly recently, most of the large-scale attempts to measure unpaid work through time use surveys occurred in the more developed economies of Europe, North America and Australia. In developing countries, there were some explorations of the unpaid work of women, but these tended to be small scale, were often qualitative in nature and tended to focus on the unpaid production of goods (such as subsistence agriculture) rather than the unpaid production of services (care). Over the last decade or two an increasing number of developing countries have conducted large-scale time use surveys that provide more reliable and representative data. However, evidence of the sort presented in this book for developing countries is not widely known or available, and has not previously been presented in a way that facilitates comparison cross countries. The book is thus intended to help fill a noticeable gap in available knowledge.

Time use surveys differ from standard labour force surveys in that they ask respondents to report on all activities carried out in a specified period, such as a day or a week. In contrast, labour force surveys focus only on the forms of work that classify a person as “employed” and that are utilised in estimations of gross domestic product (GDP). Labour force surveys can therefore tell us the likelihood of a person (male or female) of a particular age or group being employed or unemployed, the type of work they do in employment and the conditions under which they work. Time use surveys, in contrast, tell us how much time an average person from a particular social group (such as male or female, young or old, rich or poor) spends on sleeping, eating, employment-related work, socializing, and unpaid care work, such as housework and caring for children, the disabled, elderly, ill and so on, in an average day or week. Time use surveys thus provide a good basis for discussing unpaid care work in more concrete terms, and for exploring how responsibility for this interacts with the performance of other activities, such as earning an income, and how it varies along a range of individual and social characteristics.

The project of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) on Political and Social Economy of Care aims to explore the way in which care—and in particular, care of persons—is provided by the institutions of family/household, state, market and community, and by the people within these institutions. The project has been designed to bring together the findings from in-depth quantitative and qualitative research across a range of countries so as to arrive at a nuanced understanding of the similarities and differences in care provision across different contexts.

The six “core” countries for the research project are Argentina and Nicaragua in Latin America, India and the Republic of Korea in Asia, and South Africa and Tanzania in Africa. Two countries were chosen from each of these three continents in order to have one country that was more developed, both in terms of its economy and welfare services, and another that was less so. In addition, smaller research initiatives have been conducted in Switzerland and Japan so as to include examples of care in more developed economies.

All eight countries were chosen on the basis that time use survey data were available for analysis. In the first year of the project, the research teams for each of the six core countries produced a detailed research report that analysed data from these surveys in their respective countries. A similar report was subsequently produced for Japan. Although the surveys differ in some important respects (as discussed in the following paragraph), the reports utilised a relatively similar framework and attempted to analyse similar issues. This chapter summarises and compares some of the findings from the analysis of time use data from the six core countries as well as those from Japan. The country-specific chapters that follow provide more detailed analysis of the findings in each country. However, because of space restrictions, most of the country chapters do not include all the analysis included in the reports prepared for the project. This chapter thus at times includes findings from a particular country that are not covered in the country chapter.

The socioeconomic variables used by the country teams are similar in many respects. They are, however, not always completely the same or strictly comparable. The differences between countries arise, among others, from the particular situation within each country (for example, the South African concept of race and the Indian concept of caste are not relevant for the other countries). Further differences arise because of the population covered by the surveys. These include differences in the age group covered, as well as the fact that the Argentina survey covered only the city of Buenos Aires. Further differences arise as a result of the particular instruments and methodology used for the surveys in different countries, the number and nature of days covered, the information gathered through these surveys, and the options provided for answering questions. Many of these differences are described in a paper produced for the project (Budlender 2007). Despite these differences, there is sufficient common ground to allow cross-country analysis.

This chapter consists of seven sections after this short introduction, as follows.

• Key concepts briefly introduces time use–related concepts utilised in later discussion in the chapter.

• Methodologies describes and compares some of the relevant characteristics of the methodologides used for the time use surveys in each of the seven countries.

• Basic gender patterns presents a set of graphs derived from standardised sex-disaggregated tables compiled for each country. These graphs give a sense of the variation in male and female levels of engagement in, and the time spent on, employment-related work, unpaid care work and care of persons more narrowly defined.

• The Tobit estimations reports on the econometric analysis conducted in each of the countries to determine the main factors influencing the time spent on unpaid care work and person care across the six countries.

• Gender combined with other factors discusses differences and similarities across countries in the way in which gender interacts with other factors explored in the Tobit estimations in determining how much care is undertaken by different individuals. In particular, it looks at how time spent differs between women and men in each of the countries in relation to the presence of young children in the household, employment status and age.

• The care dependency ratio presents country results for a care dependency ratio proposed by the project as an indicator of care demand, in contrast to other sections which focus primarily on the supply of care.

• The “monetary” value of unpaid care work discusses various approaches to assigning value to unpaid care work, and compares the results with a range of macroeconomic indicators for the six countries. These indicators include GDP, paid work, government revenue and government expenditure on social services.

• The conclusion offers some final remarks on the relevance of the findings.

The methodology used in the different surveys, of which the results are presented in the following section, can affect the findings. The chapter thus, of necessity, includes some technical discussion.

KEY CONCEPTS

The analysis of care in the UNRISD project, and the time use component in particular, draw on a definition of care which is, in turn, based on the System of National Accounts (SNA). The SNA is a set of internationally accepted rules for calculating GDP. These rules, in essence, define how economic growth is measured. The SNA distinguishes between “production” (or “work”) and non-productive activity by defining production as any activity that one could, at least in theory, pay someone else to do. Work in a factory, as well as housework, thus constitutes production, whereas getting dressed, sleeping, socialising and studying do not.

The SNA goes further than this to distinguish production that should be included in calculations of GDP and that which should not. It states that all production of goods should be included in the calculation (in the SNA “production boundary”), whether or not the goods are sold on the market. As a result, subsistence agricultural activity, for example, would be included, as would the collection of fuel and water for household consumption. In respect of services, in contrast, only those that are sold on the market are included. Therefore, housework in one’s own home, and unpaid care for children, elderly people, the ill and disabled are not included in the calculation of GDP. It is these excluded services which this book categorises as unpaid care work or “extended SNA”.

Unpaid care work thus forms a key focus of this chapter, and the book as a whole. But unpaid care work can itself be disaggregated into different types of work. At a broad level, the International Classification of Activities for Time Use Surveys (ICATUS), which was used as the basis for coding in three of the seven countries, distinguishes between three sub-categories, namely (unpaid) household maintenance (broadly equivalent to housework), (unpaid) care of persons in one’s own household, and (unpaid) community services and help to other households.

The UNRISD project has a special interest in care of persons, and some of the analysis that will be discussed focuses on activities that constitute such care. The classification systems of all countries covered in this book allow for care of persons to be distinguished, although in some countries the sub-categories do not cover all possible types of care of persons. Further, while the ICATUS provides explicit codes for the more passive care activities of ‘supervising’ children and adults in need of care, similar provision is not made in the coding systems for Nicaragua, Japan and Korea. Korea is the only country that includes a specific code for care of spouse.

In the analysis, in some cases person care is defined as equivalent to the second sub-category (that is, unpaid care of persons in one’s own house-hold). In other cases, care of persons in other households, from the third sub-category, is also considered. In practice, the inclusion of care of persons beyond the household does not substantially affect the results at the broad level presented in the following paragraphs, because care of persons in one’s own household is generally far “larger” in terms of rates of participation and time spent on it than care of persons beyond the household.

A complicating factor in using an SNA–related definition is that, according to the SNA, the collection of fuel and water is considered to be production of goods, and is thus included in the production boundary. In practice, however, very few countries—and none of the six considered here—include the value of these activities when computing GDP. In addition, most people who carry out these activities would consider them part of household maintenance. The following discussion highlights, at relevant points, how the collection of fuel and water is classified. This question is obviously more important for less developed countries, where the activity is common, than it is for Japan, the Republic of Korea or the city of Buenos Aires.

In five of the countries the time use surveys were based on a diary approach. In this approach, respondents were asked to report what they did for each period of a 24-hour day. The periods (or “time slots”) of the day used ranged from 10 minutes in the Republic of Korea to 1 hour in India and Tanzania. Whatever the period, this approach provides a full day’s picture, including the time at which particular activities were undertaken. Japan used both a stylised approach, with 20 broad activities specified, for one part of the sample and a diary approach, post-coded into 62 activities, for the other part of the sample. Nicaragua used only a stylised approach. The Nicaragua questionnaire included 22 questions related to specific activities of the form: “Did th...

Table of contents

• Routledge/UNRISD Research in Gender and Development
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Foreword
• 1 What do Time Use Studies Tell Us about Unpaid Care Work?
• 2 Tanzania
• 3 South Africa
• 4 Unpaid Care Work
• 5 Republic of Korea
• 6 Analysis of Time Use Surveys on Work and Care in Japan
• 7 The Case of Nicaragua
• 8 Unpaid Care Work in the City of Buenos Aires
• Index