La Jornada: Women’s unpaid work is equivalent to a quarter of the economy: Oxfam

Almost eight out of every 10 people who do not study or work in paid activities are women, but they are far from doing nothing, since 95 percent of them dedicate 5.2 to 7.6 hours a day to unpaid care work, according to a report by Oxfam Mexico.

This work, although invisible, is not small, the organization points out. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi), unpaid household work represents at least a quarter (23.9 percent) of the gross domestic product, more than manufacturing industry (20.1 percent) or commerce (18.7 percent), and is mostly performed by women.

According to Oxfam’s analysis, three out of four young people who apparently neither study nor work are women who do care work without recognition or payment. On average, they spend 5.2 hours a day on some of these activities, three times more than the time spent by men of the same age.

“The young women who care do not choose, individually, to be outside the labor market or the educational system, but are pushed to care disproportionately in a context in which care is distributed unfairly and there is little or no public infrastructure to make it more dignified and without charge to the life and time of the caregivers,” he points out.

According to Inegi data analyzed by Oxfam, the unpaid care burden increases for women who have a partner or children, while it remains exactly the same for men.

On average, young women with a partner and children dedicate more hours daily to caregiving activities (6.7 hours) than single or separated mothers (6 hours). “This leads to the assumption that the presence of a male partner in the home does not reduce the care burden, but rather increases it,” according to the organization’s report.

The Oxfam report states that in more than a decade the time that women who do not study or work dedicate to care has been reduced by almost an hour, but that of men has not changed.

“In 2024, young women cared for just one hour less a day than in 2014 (yes, in a decade their care time was only reduced by one hour!), while in the same period, men who do not study or work care for exactly the same: an hour and a half a day. The decrease in the gap in care work is due more to a contraction of the time that young women dedicate to caring than to an increase in male co-responsibility,” he explained.