Unpaid Women Research Articles

Economic Valuation of Women's Unpaid Household Service Work in Bangladesh

This short note estimates the economic value of women’s unpaid household service work in Bangladesh using data from the Time Use Survey 2021 of BBS. This survey collected detailed information 17,772 respondents (10,024 female and 7,748 male) from 8,000 households on how individuals aged 15 years and older spent their time over a 24-hour period in a day on various activities. Productive time of all household members is divided into three categories: i) household chores (e.g. cooking, cleaning, etc.); ii) caregiving services for household members; and iii) paid and self-employed work. The first two categories comprise unpaid household service work. Data show that women and men spent 7 hours and 6.9 hours on productive work, respectively. In order to estimate the total economic value of women’s unpaid work, we follow an input-based replacement cost approach with generalist wage rates. Our estimate shows that the valuation of women’s unpaid care work is BDT 5,307 billion, which is equivalent to 14.8 per cent of the GDP in 2021. This figure is a meagre 2.8 per cent of GDP for men.

Glut: Affective Labor and the Burden of Abundance in Secondhand Economies

AbstractThis paper explores the interlinkages between the abundance of stuff moving through community‐based reuse organizations and the labor needed to manage this material. The glut of donations is due to the sheer volume of materials moving through a wasteful linear economic system, as well as the practice of donation dumping, where unusable used goods move through reuse economies, washing their previous owners free of guilt while entangling laborers in messy relationships with objects. I draw on theories of gendered, social reproductive labor to explore how the work of localized reuse, disproportionately borne by unpaid women, reproduces communities. Following calls for work that explores the social dimensions of circular economies, this research uses a qualitative approach that draws on two main methods: participant observation in reuse establishments and in‐depth interviews with reuse participants. This qualitative data provides a picture of reuse activities at a local scale and helps us understand the complex relationships formed and perpetuated through reuse. I find that the labor of volunteers is often unseen and undervalued and suggest that policies designed to address material surplus do so with these laborers in mind.

Have public policy and family farming been an unhappy marriage for the past 20 years?

The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have made progress in creating and implementing public policies on family farming (FF) by developing their own concepts, which converge in the fact that the family labor force is the most important link. However, this also appears to be their weakness for the future, since the exodus from the countryside to the city is affecting work in this sector, and restrictive policies in this regard could end up denying the resources needed for FF to achieve greater development. This document aims to review the existing policies, official figures, and regulations that have been created over the years to recognize and strengthen family farming (FF) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). To achieve our goals, we carried out a systematic search for technical documents (books, reports, and papers with official figures), policies, and legislation related to FF in LAC. Several countries have developed concepts to make policies focused on family farmers. Nonetheless, all converge in that the family workforce is the most critical link in this conceptualization. However, it also seems to be its Achilles’ heel for the future since the field-city exodus is affecting this sector, and restrictive policies could reduce the necessary resources for FF to achieve more significant development. Furthermore, the most significant challenges are found in conducting research on crops and animal species that mainly affect FF, such as corn, beans, rice, cassava, vegetables, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and milk. Finally, efforts need to focus on studying changes in family composition, the quality of land, the role of family farmers as guardians of ancestral and native crops, excluding FF export crops. Unpaid women must not be forgotten as a vital part of FF because domestic and production units are closely related.

The International Labour Review and gender equality: The importance of women's unpaid and paid work

AbstractThis introduction to the Centenary Issue of the International Labour Review (ILR) on women and gender equality reflects on the distinctive contributions included. It emphasizes the need to recognize the undervaluation of work that women have traditionally performed both in the home and in the labour market. It also highlights diverse efforts to remedy these intricately linked problems.

Its About Time We Care About an Equitable World: Women's Unpaid Care Work and COVID-19

Unpaid care work, mostly performed by women, is a central but undervalued contributor to economies. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for unpaid care work increased due to restricted movement, social isolation, and economic challenges. This pandemic has highlighted the urgency of recognizing and valuing women's work at the household level which has been systematically overlooked. At the same time, it has increased the demand for technology usage, exposing the gender digital divide. This article aims to shed light on the additional burden women are facing, especially when trying to balance unpaid care work with paid employment from the seclusion of their homes. We do this by reviewing a number of surveys conducted in Indonesia. We combine this with other examples from additional contexts in order to draw attention to a global trend of amplified inequalities and struggles women are experiencing. We advocate for an urgent paradigm shift by providing vital recommendations for policymakers and managers.

SELF-TRACKING ‘FEMTECH’: COMMODIFYING & DISCIPLINING THE FERTILE FEMALE BODY

This paper engages with feminist political economists to explore questions of affective labour and value-production in self-tracking technologies designed for the female body (‘femtech’). Self-tracking femtech is largely characterised by smartphone applications and smart devices that track user data relating to menstruation, fertility periods, sexual activity, ovulation, hormones, and health and wellbeing. This data can be collected through self-reporting or through automated transmission from sensory devices attached to the body. By reflecting on my own experiences with these technologies, this paper argues that users of self-tracking femtech perform the labour of reproducing our bodies and our affective relations in ways that are amenable to both capitalist and patriarchal structures of power. Situated within the broader shifts of care and social reproduction, self-tracking femtech can be understood as affective infrastructures that re-stabilise gender norms and continue to unevenly push the burden of reproduction onto a class of unpaid women. I explore the ways that affective experiences are shaped and modulated by self-trackers to (re)produce and discipline the fertile and sexual female body to be $2 a productive labouring body and heterosexually attractive feminine subjectivity. The labour of reproduction is further intertwined here with the labour of producing data for digital media industries that generates profit in the advertising marketplace. By examining co-constitutive and paradoxical forms of value at play, I dually situate self-tracking femtech within broader political struggles and locate the spaces of agency in our everyday entanglements with digital media technologies.

Economic status of women in India: paradox of paid–unpaid work and poverty

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand the dynamics of women labor considering their unpaid work status. The intention is to understand the precise meaning of unpaid work and its magnitudes and trends in India. This study explores the causes of women to be engaged in unpaid work and the reason behind the non-reduction of unpaid labor as prophesied by the standard theories of economic development. Furthermore, this study aims to examine the nexus of the work status of women and its impact on poverty to give possible recommendations for promoting faster and more inclusive growth of the Indian economy.Design/methodology/approachFor addressing the above-mentioned issues, this study has used the data of 50th, 55th, 61st and 68th surveys conducted from 1993–1994 to 2011–2012 by National Sample Survey Office. In the first stage of analysis, the magnitude of unpaid work by women has been estimated. Subsequently, the relative contributions of socio-economic and demographics on the work status of women (paid and unpaid) in India have been assessed by using logistic regression model. In the second stage, the level of poverty among paid and unpaid women has been measured by using poverty estimation methodology. Furthermore, the incidence of poverty among unpaid women has been decomposed, and the contribution of socio-economic predictors has been measured.FindingsThe study reveals that the participation of women in paid activities has been consistently declined. During the study period, it is observed that the amount of unpaid work activities of women has significantly increased. Moreover, the increase of unpaid activities is more intense for those women who are less educated, marginalized and belong to the poorer household.Originality/valueThe key contributions of this study are to underpin the issue of low and declining participation of female labor force in India as well as to understand the dynamics of changing work status (paid to unpaid) of females in the neo-liberal development framework. Furthermore, this study explores the consequences of the increase in unpaid work on poverty, which has not been the focus of previous studies.

Community-based care of children affected by AIDS in Swaziland: a gender-aware analysis.

Care of children affected by AIDS in Swaziland is predominately provided by families, with support from 'community-based responses'. This approach is consistent with United Nations International Children's Fund's (UNICEF) framework for the protection, care and support of children affected by AIDS. However, the framework relies heavily on voluntary caregiving which is highly gendered. It pays limited attention to caregivers' well-being or sustainable community development which enables more effective caregiving. As a result, the framework is incompatible with the social justice principles of primary health care, and the sustainable development goals (SDGs).AimOur aim was to examine the effects and gender dimensions of providing voluntary, community-based, care-related labour for children affected by AIDS. We conducted multiple-methods research involving an ethnography and participatory health research, in a rural Swazi community. We analysed data related to community-based responses using an abductive, mixed-methods technique, informed by the capabilities approach to human development and a gender analysis framework.FindingsTwo community-based responses, 'neighbourhood care points' (facilities that provide children meals) and the 'lihlombe lekukhalela' (child protector) program were being implemented. The unpaid women workers at neighbourhood care points reported working in challenging conditions (eg, lacking labour-saving technologies), insufficient and diminishing material support (eg, no food), and receiving limited support from the broader community. Child protectors indicated their effectiveness was limited by lack of social power, relative to the perpetrators of child abuse. The results indicate that support for community-based responses will be enhanced by acknowledging and addressing the highly gendered nature of care-related labour and social power, and that increasing access to material resources including food, caregiver stipends and labour-saving technologies, is essential. These strategies will simultaneously contribute to the social and economic development of communities central to primary health care, and achieving the poverty, hunger, gender and work-related SDGs.

≪ If it's not documented, it's not done ≫: Management indicators of workload can leave women's work invisible

Historically, eldercare was usually furnished by unpaid women at home. Now that women are in paid work, much of this care is given by personal support workers (PSWs), usually female. With the massive introduction of management indicators in public organisations, a form of organisational silence appears: work is rendered invisible. To examine the mechanism involved, we have observed the work of 37 PSWs in six Ontario residences, and performed interviews. Contrary to the way tasks are assigned, PSW work is often done collectively and documentation requirements are demanding; documenting can even conflict with direct health care. PSWs have insufficient time, so they are sometimes forced to omit data showing the challenges of their work. They thus contribute to a vicious circle where, unable to document the work they do, they lack resources and must skimp even more on documentation.

Women's Invisible Contribution: Quantifying the Economic Value of Women's Unpaid Care Activities in Turkey and Policy Options to Reduce Women's Care Burden

Women, whether in employment or not, spend a significant amount of time in Turkey occupied in unpaid home-based care activities, providing care for children and the elderly in their families. Among OECD countries, the country ranks second in terms of the amount of time women spend on unpaid household chores and activities. This paper estimates the economic value of time women allocate in Turkey to direct care activities at home by using two main methodologies: (i) the opportunity cost method estimates the value of time using each woman’s potential earnings in the labor market, and (ii) the proxy good method calculates the value of time taking into account a constant fixed value of hourly earnings (either the minimum wage or the average wage of a social worker). The value of direct care, which constitutes a lower-bound for overall care activities of women, is estimated to be around 1.37-3.34 percent of GDP as of 2011. Using the opportunity cost of earnings methodology, the paper estimates the economic value of refocusing the time spent on care activities to employment to be 1.5 billion USD for working women and 4.8 billion USD for non-working women.

The Personal Is Political Economy

The study of the history of political economy seems indifferent to gender or the actions of women. Emphasis on financialization rather than industrialization de-emphasizes the role of paid and unpaid women’s labor. Highlighting gender makes for a truer, richer history.

Working for Free in the VIP

Why do workers participate in their own exploitation? This article moves beyond the situational production of consent that has dominated studies of the labor process and outlines the relational production of labor’s surplus value. Using a case of unpaid women who perform valuable work for VIP nightclubs, I present ethnographic data on the VIP party circuit from New York, the Hamptons, Miami, and Cannes, as well as 84 interviews with party organizers and guests. Party promoters, mostly male brokers, appropriate surplus value from women in four stages: recruitment, mobilization, performance, and control. Relational work between promoters and women, cemented by gifts and strategic intimacies, frames women’s labor as leisure and friendship, and boundary work legitimizes women’s work as distinct from sexual labor. When boundaries, media, and meanings of relationships do not appropriately align, as in relational mismatches, women experience the VIP party less as leisure and more as work, and they are less likely to participate. My findings embed the labor process in a relational infrastructure and hold insights for explaining why people work for free in culture and technology sectors of the post-Fordist economy.

A Women’s Development Army: Narratives of Community Health Worker Investment and Empowerment in Rural Ethiopia

Creating community health worker jobs in the public sector is a prominent goal in the global health development industry. According to industry leaders, Ethiopia’s government has created community health worker jobs at a scale and in a way that other countries can look to as a model. Based on extensive document review and interviews with district, national, and international health officials, we show that narratives about saving lives, empowering women, and creating model citizens in a context of resource scarcity allow Ethiopia’s ruling party to obtain international admiration for creating salaried community health worker jobs and to simultaneously avoid criticisms of its concurrent use of unpaid women’s community health labor. Public sector community health worker investments in the twenty-first century reveal the layered narratives inherent in global development practices that entangle states, international donors, NGOs, and citizens.

Enterprising widows and active wives: women's unpaid work in the household economy of early modern England

This article uses 75 matching pairs of probate inventories and supporting documents belonging to married men and their widows to investigate women's unpaid income-generating work within the household economy of rural and small town England between 1534 and 1699. The inventories are drawn from seven localities: county Durham, Cheshire, Chesterfield in Derbyshire, Stratford-upon-Avon, east Kent, Devon, and Cornwall, and are supplemented with evidence from wills and probate accounts. Evidence of work is inferred from the goods listed in the probate inventories. By examining widows' household economies in comparison to the economies of the marital household they shared with their husband, it is possible to discern not only those forms of work women felt able to manage independently during widowhood, but also to suggest their work activities during marriage. Widows' most common form of work activity was agriculture, followed by food processing and textile production. Widows also worked in retailing and inn- and tavern-keeping. Money-lending was the only activity that was more common in widows' inventories than the inventories of married men. While some women shared expertise with their husband, and continued very similar forms of work during widowhood, many women had their own occupations distinct from their husband's work. Widows' inventories record less valuable moveable assets than married men's inventories, and contain less evidence of work; this is explained largely by some widows' old age and widows' lack of property in comparison to married men.

Failing at retailing: the decline of the Larkin Company, 1918‐1942

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore and identify the causes of the failure of the Larkin Company (Buffalo, NY), once one of the nation's largest mail‐order houses in the decades surrounding 1900.Design/methodology/approachBorrowing conceptual frameworks from both recent management and historical scholarship on organizational failure that integrates exogenous and endogenous factors, this study employs traditional historical methods to explain the causes of Larkin's failure. The main primary sources include the Larkin Company records, government documents, personal papers, trade journals, and other primary sources.FindingsBegun as a modest soap manufacturer by John D. Larkin, in Buffalo, in 1875, the Larkin Company grew to become one of the largest mail‐order houses in the USA in the decades surrounding 1900 owing to its innovative direct marketing practices, called the “factory‐to‐family” plan, that relied on unpaid women to distribute its products. In 1918, anticipating the chain store boom, Larkin established two grocery store chains (other retail ventures followed). The company regularly lost money in these ventures and, combined with a shrinking mail‐order economy, struggled during the 1920s and 1930s, and eventually liquidated in 1941‐1942. A number of exogenous and endogenous factors, acting alone and in various combinations, proved too challenging to second‐ and third‐generation family members who ran the company after 1926.Originality/valueThis research paper tries to understand the decline of an important progressive firm during the interwar period. Whereas Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward were able to make the transition from mail order to stores, Larkin Company failed to navigate this transition successfully. It also adds to the small but important literature in management and business history on organizational failure and may serve as a cautionary tale for family businesses.

Everyday Revolutions: Eighteenth-Century Women Transforming Public and Private (review)

Reviewed by: Everyday Revolutions: Eighteenth-Century Women Transforming Public and Private Kristi L. Krumnow Diane E. Boyd and Marta Kvande , eds. Everyday Revolutions: Eighteenth-Century Women Transforming Public and Private (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2008). Pp. 287. $58.50. The goal of the collaborative project by Diane E. Boyd and Marta Kvande is not only to explore further the revolutionary moments that women, both literary and real, have enacted, but to reevaluate prior scholarship on the public/private binary. The collection of nine essays, written primarily by junior scholars, expounds on the grey area between the two spheres, highlighting in depth the complexity of binarisms in several ways. First, this work treats the topic itself; second, it is coedited by two scholars: one younger and the other more seasoned; third, the collection highlights newer readings over older ones; fourth, the collection is intentionally "stepping outside of hierarchy" (back flap) in academic publication. Binaries highly conflated within the collection itself (in title, editorship, and essay authorship) reveal the exactness with which people understand the bifurcated world of public and private. The collection exposes not only revolutionary moments but also periods that endured and helped to encourage social reform where necessary. For example, the essay by Brett C. McInelly focuses on Methodist women who broke through gendered spheres to profess their faith, unashamedly prizing individual faith over societal restrictions. McInelly's essay contributes to the collection as it breaks through the academic binary of political and religious, one that tends in effect to prioritize the political over the religious, which, he argues, proves the "other[ing]" (136) of religious experience within academic circles. Aruna Krishnamurthy exposes how the poet Mary Collier disrupts the standard social conventions of the binary. She argues that the poet deliberately confounds notions of binary division between paid male laborers and unpaid women domestic farm tenders when society institutionalizes "the new competitive spirit between laboring men and women" (71). Allistaire Tallent's reading of French memoir-novel prostitutes as heroines calls into question a public/private divide when the first-person narration is written by male authors. These "hack writers" (119) were, Tallent proves, part of an underground [End Page 282] literary sphere that, in hopes of subversive, clandestine publication, "ventriloquized" (119) women's voices and private experiences. The heroine-prostitute also blurred the rigid binary by conducting business in private spaces and equally provoking private moments in public. Although the previous essays treat religious, social, and poetic themes, the majority in the collection is based and centered on the novel. Emily Smith elucidates the binary of art/nature in eighteenth-century writing when carving words into trees becomes revolutionary vandalism: engraving symbolizes a violent incision into yet another binary, that of the English/Canadian geographical divide. Furthermore, the epistolary genre of the novel destabilizes the geographical divide with the exchange of trans-Atlantic missives that undermine dominant discourses of love, sexuality, and linguistics. The epistolary form reappears in an essay by Marta Kvande in which she discusses the ruses played in both Evelina and Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph that counter the rash delineation of public/private. The letter writers wittingly play both spheres to their advantage, coyly using figures of speech as well as "a serious display of disobedience" (171). Two chapters in the collection cleverly use literal images to deconstruct the paradigm. In Diane E. Boyd's essay, she convincingly proves how the coach as chronotope in Belinda represents a barrier breakdown, as it goes between the public and private, conforming at times to the needs of both. Likewise, Shea Stuart identifies artistic framing of public/private in Mansfield Park to explain how manor houses divided the public from the private by framing natural borders for the private purposes of scenic "emparkment" (209). Mansfield Park becomes its own "liminal space" (207) in relying on itself as private to re-create its own public functions. The first and last articles appropriately "bookended" (24) the collection. Cheryl Nixon's work shows how, despite being legally voiceless, women defied the public/private paradigm in legal matters of the time. Using literature alongside legal archives, the author convincingly demonstrates in which manner real and fictional women of...

Women's Unpaid Labour in Neo-Liberal India

This paper explores trends in women's unpaid labour across the national employment surveys of 1993-1994, 1999-2000 and 2004. It argues that unpaid labour by women in production constitutes an important element in understanding how restricted employment opportunities have affected women across the period of neo4iberal reforms in India. It shows how employment trends and patterns in recent times appear to have thrown up many socially regressive trends in the sphere of women's work.

Gender and inflation targeting in South Africa: Brief feminist notes

abstract Tito Mboweni's commitment to inflation targeting has met with support from those economists who believe that high interest rates would curb inflationary spending by individual spenders and would put limits on the inter-bank loans made by commercial banks. However, harsh criticism has emerged from various quarters, especially the labour movement that has argued that such austere inflation controls affect the majority of workers already suffering from high food and fuel costs that have impacted the world economy. Arguments also abound that inflation targets (IT) cannot control the cost of oil therefore price stability can never be assured. Within the South African context, a few feminist arguments have been voiced against interest rate controls as a tool to curb inflation, but these have not been widely articulated or publicised. This focus examines a feminist argument against interest rate driven inflation targeting. The argument engages some assumptions that ‘objective’ macroeconomic policies make about the ‘ungendered’ market and assesses how women more than men are affected by traditional fiscal and monetary policies due to the gendered nature of poverty and labour in our country and other developing countries. Finally, it proposes alternatives to curbing inflation that concentrate on employment generation in addition to IT. It also calls for the introduction of a gender-sensitive international economic and financial system that takes into account the differential effects of economic policies on men and women and calculates women's unpaid productive and reproductive work as a contribution to the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Recasting the Global Political Economy: Counting Women's Unpaid Work

This article presents and seeks to make visible what could be an alarming scenario. There is, we believe, a widespread and growing depletion of the capacities and resources for social reproduction ...

Snapshot on Identity: Women's contributions addressing community relations in a rural Northern Irish district

Synopsis In this article, I examine the efforts of The Moyle Women's Forum, a community-based, voluntary women's organization in Northern Ireland, to undertake a photo-voice project. The project, titled Snapshot on Identity, is intended to contribute to their rural community by challenging cross-community relations between, and gendered ideologies associated with, Protestant and Catholic women. Feminist scholars have long demonstrated that unpaid work done mostly by women in households is productive and makes economic and social contributions. This scholarly literature has tended to concentrate on analyses of states, markets and households and overlooks women's contributions to their communities. Using the concept of social profitability, I argue that women's efforts, through the cross-community Snapshot on Identity project, developed personal skills, enriched the social environment and enhanced civic participation in their rural district. Drawing on semi-structured interview data with women, I illustrate how this project shaped their perceptions about the ability to change community relations and offered optimism about community relations in the rural district of Moyle in the future. Using this example from Northern Ireland, I demonstrate that while social profitability is a useful concept for recognizing the full extent of women's unpaid contributions in communities, it must be considered in ways that account for the specificity of social, historical and political contexts.