Women in Latin America and the Caribbean - Cepal

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Some progress has been made since the decision by the Directing Council of the Pan American
Health Organization (PAHO) to encourage governments to “include, as appropriate, in the National
Health Accounts indicators for the unremunerated time devoted by men and women to health care in the
home, as a function of the total expenditure of the health care system” (PAHO, 2005).
During the two virtual forums held in January and February 2007 in preparation for the tenth
session of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, most of the
countries’ mechanisms for the advancement of women agreed on the need to make unpaid work and its
contribution to GDP visible in national accounts. Political will is critical to the development and
sustainability of initiatives in this direction. One interesting example is the enactment of Law No. 1168 by
the legislature of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (Argentina) on 1 December 2003, setting out the
need to quantify the economic contribution of “housewives” and the determination that this should be
done. The law stipulates that the city government statistics agency should periodically conduct a
systematic survey to quantify the economic contribution made by women in the form of domestic work
(Colli, 2006).
Some calculations and studies carried out in the region’s countries to assess the economic value
of unpaid work suggest that its contribution to GDP is substantial. In Mexico, for instance, a study that
used 2002 data to impute market wages to different activities conducted in the home found that these
activities made a larger contribution to the economy (21.6% of GDP) than traditional sectors such as
commerce, restaurants and hotels (20%) and manufacturing (18.5%) (Pedrero, 2005). A similar exercise
carried out in Nicaragua using information from the time-use module of the National Household Living
Standards Survey (EMNV, 1998) put the value of all reproductive work at the equivalent of almost 30%
of GDP that year, with women contributing 78.5% of this value (Aguilar and Espinosa, 2004).
There are different views on the desirability of including unpaid household work in satellite
accounts, which would alter the traditional composition of the national accounts. Another ongoing debate
concerns possible methodologies for valuing domestic and care work. One of the most controversial
aspects is the use of market prices to set a monetary value on unpaid work.
Viewing unpaid work from an economic perspective strips it of its exclusively “female” and
family connotations and raises issues of efficiency and equity in the economic system as a whole
(Picchio, 2001). The invisibility of women’s unpaid work is only part of the problem. The extent and
economic value of such work are not easy to calculate because, as Budlender (2002) has pointed out, the
very fact that it is unpaid means there are no obvious monetary measures, while it is generally
undervalued in the market; nor are there obvious measures of output, as it is often intangible. This being
the case, the most commonly used method has been to employ time-use surveys to measure the number of
people carrying out such work and the time they spend on it.
J. TIME-USE SURVEYS AND THEIR POTENTIAL POLICYMAKING INPUT
Analysing labour market data in isolation from those relating to domestic work has prevented observation
of the strong interrelationships between the two and has helped to perpetuate the erroneous and
widespread belief that male and female workers participate in the labour market on similar economic
terms, while family constraints and the sexual division of labour are relegated to the “non-economic”
realm (Carrasco, 2001). The evidence shows that no category could be less appropriate than “inactivity”
when applied to “housewives” (see figure II.14).