Women in Latin America and the Caribbean - Cepal

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I. VISIBILITY AND MEASUREMENT IN THE NATIONAL ACCOUNTS
For almost three decades, there have been calls from the United Nations and from academic and feminist
circles for care and domestic activities in the home to be classified as value-generating work and as a
measurable component of wealth. Few efforts have been made in this direction, however, not only owing
to technical and methodological difficulties, but also because the statistical measurement of unpaid social
reproduction work would require a conceptualization of the economic system that allowed the scale and
quality of this work to be properly recorded (Picchio, 2001).
The system of national accounts (SNA) review adopted by the United Nations Statistical
Commission in 1993 recommended that the concept of “production” should include not just goods and
services produced for the market but also goods produced in the home for family consumption. These were
left out of the classification, however, and activities associated with the production of personal and domestic
services by household members for their own consumption were consequently treated as “non-economic”.
One consequence of this is that these activities are not included in conventional censuses and surveys.
In 1995, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report
revealed that women were responsible for over half the total time worked in the world and that they
carried out more work in total (in terms of physical units of time) than men. The report also highlighted
the fact that three quarters of men’s working time was spent on paid activities, while only a third of
women’s working time was paid. In other words, women do more work than men, but the current
economic and political system does not record, measure, value or reward it. Studies dealing with
household income, and particularly those concerned with poverty, explicitly consider the contribution of
family members to income, but continue to ignore the contribution made by social reproduction work.
The inclusion of unpaid work —be it housework, caregiving or subsistence activities— in
systems of national accounts has major consequences, given the importance of these instruments for
policymaking and economic decision-making at both the national and the international levels. National
accounts quantify all the areas deemed to be part of the national economy and resources are allocated on
the basis of the information they provide. This means that any economic activities not included in this
system or in the satellite accounts are not only invisible but will not receive the vital resources they need
to improve their performance, while the policies and programmes that target them will not reflect their
real needs or their contribution to national development.
To date, the region has had no experience of national accounts systems that bring out the nonmonetary
contribution of the social reproduction work done by women and some men, in the way that the
Total Work Accounts System (TWAS) developed in Canada does. This system was created against a
background of heated political debate about budgetary constraints on social security and social policies,
and was based on three observations: (i) wealth-creating work is not confined to the activities measured
by conventional labour market surveys; (ii) the strong links between paid and unpaid work make it
difficult to isolate their behaviour when only the economically “active” population is considered; (iii) paid
work is a subset of “work of economic value”.
The Total Work Accounts System was based on the 1998 General Social Survey on Time Use,
which collected time-use data. One of its greatest contributions was to assign the estimated output of each
activity classified as unpaid work to a specific beneficiary or group, thereby identifying its destination,
while also allowing domestic responsibilities and the needs of family members to be taken into account in
any studies dealing with labour issues (Statistics Canada, 1998).