Women's work

About: Women's work is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1625 publications have been published within this topic receiving 33754 citations. The topic is also known as: woman's work.

Understanding Women's Work Using Time-Use Statistics: The Case of India

Abstract: Labor force surveys have undergone several changes over the years in order to better estimate the size and understand the characteristics of the work and labor forces. It is frequently argued, however, that these surveys still tend to underestimate the workforce, particularly women and certain productive activities that they perform. By comparing the findings of the National Sample Survey Organisation's 1999–2000 employment–unemployment survey in India with the findings of the 1998–9 pilot Indian Time Use Survey, this study shows that the latter survey has some built-in advantages that lead to improved estimates and understanding of the workforce. The case of India illustrates how a time-use survey can provide improved estimates of and better information on the workforce in a developing country, particularly capturing women's participation in informal employment, including subsistence production. Documenting this work is important, since it is increasingly common as developing and developed econo...

Women's Work, Housework and Childcare, before and during Covid-19

Abstract: Evidence from past economic crises indicates that recessions often affect men's and women's employment differently, with a greater impact on male-dominated sectors The current COVID-19 crisis presents novel characteristics that have affected economic, health and social phenomena over wide swaths of the economy Social distancing measures to combat the spread of the virus, such as working from home and school closures, have placed an additional tremendous burden on families Using new survey data collected in April 2020 from a representative sample of Italian women, we analyse jointly the effect of COVID-19 on the working arrangements, housework and childcare of couples where both partners work Our results show that most of the additional workload associated to COVID-19 falls on women while childcare activities are more equally shared within the couple than housework activities According to our empirical estimates, changes to the amount of housework done by women during the emergency do not seem to depend on their partners' working arrangements With the exception of those continuing to work at their usual place of work, all of the women surveyed spend more time on housework than before In contrast, the amount of time men devote to housework does depend on their partners' working arrangements: men whose partners continue to work at their usual workplace spend more time on housework than before The link between time devoted to childcare and working arrangements is more symmetric, with both women and men spending less time with their children if they continue to work away from home For home schooling, too, parents who continue to go to their usual workplace after the lockdown are less likely to spend greater amounts of time with their children than before Similar results emerge for our sample of women not working before the emergency Finally, analysis of work-life balance satisfaction shows that working women with children aged 0-5 are those who say they find balancing work and family more difficult during COVID-19 The work-life balance is especially difficult to achieve for those with partners who continue to work outside the home during the emergency

Exploring the “feminisation of poverty” in relation to women’s work and home-based enterprise in slums of the Global South

Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore links between a revisionist view of the “feminisation of poverty” in developing countries and women’s work and home-based enterprise in urban slums. Design/methodology/approach – The paper’s discussion of the “feminisation of poverty” draws substantially from ethnographic field research conducted in The Gambia, The Philippines and Costa Rica. This research led the author to propose the notion of a “feminisation of responsibility and/or obligation”. The latter approach draws attention to issues such as gendered disparities of labour, time and resource inputs into household livelihoods, which are often most marked in male-headed units, and are not captured in conventional referents of the “feminisation of poverty”, which are rather narrowly confined to incomes and female household headship. Findings – An integral element of the author’s critique is that the main policy response to classic “feminisation of poverty” thinking, to date, has been to “feminise” an...