Las women double the number of men in the daily hours dedicated to caring for household members and they exceed men in 1:30 hours in the time allocated per day to domestic tasks. These are the results of the first National Survey of Time Use (ENUT 2021) published by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (Indec) that seeks to make visible one of the pillars on which gender inequality is built, and that is the unequal distribution of care tasks, which fall mostly on women.
The burden that women have on unpaid care tasks, which implies devoting less time to professional development, represents one of the reasons that make it difficult for women to enter the formal labor market and, later, their inclusion in the pension system. In order to have official information on which to design policies, the Indec published the ENUT 2021 that reveals how Argentines distribute their time during the day for the different daily activities.
“We have taken a new leap in quality because -I am convinced-, more than a point of arrival, the expansion of the statistical service must be a process of permanent construction that accompanies the social dynamics and provides valuable knowledge about Argentina”, highlighted the minister. of the organism Marco Lavagna.
The survey revealed that 92.9 percent of people aged 14 and over carry out some activity of a productive nature, 46.4 percent participate in work in the occupation and 83.8 percent carry unpaid work tasks, where on average 5:18 hours per day are spent on these tasks.
The results showed marked differences between the genders with respect to unpaid work, that is, unpaid domestic work, care work for household members, and support work for other households (family and non-family), for the community. and volunteer. The Differences in time use between men and women are maintained throughout life: In all age groups, men participate in a greater proportion and dedicate more hours to work in the labor market than women, while women outnumber men in unpaid work.
While 56 per cent of the activities linked to the labor market are carried out by men, those who carry out most of the unpaid work are women: 91.7 per cent carry out domestic work, care work or support for other households or voluntary, while, in the case of men, 75.1 percent do so.
The participation of women in the different forms of unpaid work is always greater than that of men, both in domestic work (90 percent compared to 69.1 percent) and in caring for household members ( 31.4 percent vs. 20.3 percent) and support for other households, the community, and volunteers (9.3 percent vs. 6.1 percent). As a result, the workload in care tasks is 3:30 hours per day for men. Women almost double that time with 6:07 hours on average.
In the case of domestic work, there is also a time difference of almost 1:30 hours between women (4:06 hours) and men (2:38 hours), while in support work for other households, for the community and voluntary, there are no significant variations in time by sex (3:58 hours for women and 3:41 for men).
As explained by Indec, the importance of this study lies in having data on the use of time to achieve goal 5.4 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5, which requires recognizing, reducing and redistributing unpaid care work. as a condition for achieving gender equality.
“At the end of 2021, when we were going through the final phase of the health emergency ordered by the coronavirus pandemic, we carried out this challenging task. With an innovative conceptual design, ENUT 2021 also expanded its geographical scope: it is the first survey on the use of time with national coverage in which the activity diary is applied,” Lavagna highlighted in the study.