Beatrice Avolio, director of the Centrum PUCP Women's Center, examines women's labor-force involvement and the responsibilities that they are required to perform owing to their gender, such as home activities, resulting in a larger load of work than their male counterparts.
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| Women's paid and unpaid works |
The integration of women into the workforce is arguably the most significant quiet social upheaval of the twentieth century. Their workforce engagement has increased throughout in recent decades, especially in Peru, where the female labor participation rate has reached 70% in 2019. (ILO, 2022). As a result, we now live in a world with very high expectations of women. Despite the fact that we have a higher labor-force participation rate, our "role as a woman" requires us to perform domestic activities that are unappealing and associated with our gender.
Time usage studies, in this sense, give information on how individuals use their time. The most recent national study on time utilization in Peru was conducted in 2010. Thanks to the efforts of Centrum PUCP, a study was conducted in Lima in 2019 that yielded key results on the use of time by men and women in Peru, as well as whether the situation for women has progressed towards patterns of greater parity. Thus, women today have a bigger burden than males (12.07 h vs. 10.7 h per day), and we devote around 0.63 hours less to paid work than men, but 1.99 hours more to undertaking unpaid work.
In other words, women dedicate 38% of their time to housework , while men invest only 24%. If we analyze these differences, we can glimpse that they imply significant consequences for the balance between women's work and personal lives, since they must carry out several activities simultaneously to fulfill the various roles that challenge them on a daily basis.
Women devote less hours to paid activities regardless of socioeconomic status or age range since they are the primary caregiver and leader of the household. Younger women (under 27 years old) are an exception since they have the same workload as their male colleagues in the top socioeconomic level. What is interesting about this group of women is that their commitment to housekeeping remains larger than that of males. This demonstrates that the condition of young women is similarly precarious.
One would think that the new generations put aside these cultural norms detaching themselves from the tasks socially attached to the female sex , but, although they have joined the world of work , they continue to be the main responsible for the activities in their homes, which results in a greater workload for them.
The findings reveal that the development of family obligations has not changed and, worse, that new generations of women are in a more difficult condition than earlier generations. This encourages us to see the need of contemplating and acting, realizing that domestic work must be a collaborative effort, and rejecting the notion that it is a feminine responsibility. Thinking from a fair and supportive time-use criterion, we must produce modifications that begin with our closest environment: ourselves and our houses.
The author Beatrice Avolio is the director of the Centrum PUCP Women's Center in Peru.