A Woman's Job is Never Done - A WOW! e-Brief
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A WEST AFRICAN WOMAN
Life is not easy for women in the developing countries of Asia, Latin America or Africa. They struggle daily just to keep pace with their most basic needs and those of their families. A typical woman in a developing country is burdened with approximately 17 hours of work each day, leaving little time to spend on activities that can better her quality of life.
Bersigguia, a young women living in West Africa, is one of these women. She is burdened with great responsibility, yet has little real power to make decisions or contemplate choices.
Bersigguia’s routine begins at 4:45 a.m. and will last 17 hours. Besides a moment to chat with friends at the water well, her first 15 minutes are the only part of the day that she can call her own. She washes, eats (after her husband and sons are finished) and contemplates her future.
With a new baby growing inside her, an infant on her back and a toddler by her side, she walks several miles to the field. She plows, plants, weeds and cultivates the crops for her family’s bare survival. Women like Bersigguia produce 80 percent of the food in Africa; in Asia and the Pacific, 60 percent.
As she works monotonously in the sun, she remembers her sister’s death in childbirth last spring and the death of many children born in her village. The unborn child stirs. What will its chances be, she wonders? As a West African woman, the chances of Bersigguia herself dying at childbirth are 70 times greater than those of women in the developed world.
As the hours pass, she tightens the belt around her waist to numb the hunger pangs. Finally, cued by waning daylight, she begins her journey home, stopping to chop and gather fuel wood to carry on her head. She is exhausted, but the day is only two-thirds over.
Ways to Give
For the evening meal she pounds grain for an hour using a hollowed-out log for the mortar and a wooden pole for the pestle. With the precious wood she collected on her way home she lights a fire in her three-stone stove and sets her only pot there to cook the grain. Then she starts the long walk to the water source where she hauls water from a well to fill her pot. She carries the heavy load home as the sun sets.
In the late evening, she and her children drink the thin millet soup. She cares for her children, talks to her husband, rolls out a straw mat and sleeps. Her life can be a seemingly endless repetition of this day, varied only by the other burdensome tasks she must do: wash clothes at the riverside, harvest and process food crops and carry loads of charcoal or food to markets for a little money.
WOMEN'S BURDENS TAKE MANY FORMS
Many women in the developing world share a daily routine similar to Bersigguia’s, working long hours for little or no pay. They earn 10 percent of the world’s income, yet account for over 60 percent of the labor performed in some areas. Time spent on activities such as gathering water and firewood, caring for children, the sick and the elderly, and preparing meals, leaves little time and energy for women to find ways to improve their lives. Often, when opportunities do arise, such as a training or education seminar, they simply do not have the time to attend. Focusing on gender inequities in labor, such as long working hours and unequal work is one way to address burdens women face in many parts of the world.
Gender inequality in women’s employment takes many forms. First, women tend to be concentrated in more precarious forms of labor in which earnings are low. This means that they are largely employed in informal sectors of the work force which are not regulated by governments, allowing working hours to be long and pay low. Within the informal economy, women work in areas associated with unstable earnings and high risks of poverty.
In developing countries, more than 60 percent of women are engaged in informal employment, far more if small-scale agriculture is included. A large proportion of these women participate in the informal economy as domestic workers, unpaid contributing workers to family enterprises and industrial subcontractors. Women working in the informal sector often must deal with difficult working conditions, including long working hours, job insecurity and the lack of benefits.
Second, within employment categories, women’s hourly wages are less than those of men. In both industrialized and developing countries, when women work outside the home they earn much less than do men. According to UNICEF, in Latin America and South Asia women’s wages are around 40 percent of men’s, 50 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, and around 60 percent in East Asia and industrialized countries.
Ways to Give
Third, women work fewer hours than men in paid labor. This is in part due to the large amount of time women spend on unpaid labor, such as care-giving and food preparation. Research indicates that at least half of women’s total work time is spent on unpaid labor. In some regions, women spend on average 34 percent of their time on paid market work and 66 percent on unpaid labor, compared to 76 and 24 percent, respectively, for men. For example, in rural Nepal, men spend 8 hours a day on market work and only 2 hours on home production while women spend 7.4 hours on market work and 5 hours on home production. Often, women also must overlap these activities in order to take care of children and prepare meals.
Whether they are in industrialized or developing countries, women generally work more hours than do men. According to Oxfam, women in developing nations work 60 to 90 hours per week, and recent time-use surveys demonstrate that their working hours exceed those of men by a wide margin. At least half of women’s total work time is spent on unpaid activities, which ranges from caring for children, the sick and the elderly to domestic chores and food production for families.
Most economic systems are based on the notion that the best way to measure the value of work is through the money that is paid in exchange for it. The problem with valuing work solely through monetary transactions is that a large segment of the population, primarily women, receives no compensation for the work they perform.
Because the majority of the work women perform remains unpaid, the actual work they do remains invisible in national accounts systems and economies. When governments, both local and national, create budgets to allocate resources, women are oftentimes overlooked because they are not seen as being as “productive” as their male counterparts. In addition, the invisibility of women’s unpaid labor affects cultural and social expectations, adding to the perception that women are not as economically productive as men and therefore should not receive equal social entitlements, such as access to political power, equal wages or pensions.
To illustrate, when girls reach adolescence they are usually expected to spend more time on domestic chores, while boys will spend more time on farm or wage work. By the time girls and boys reach adulthood, women usually work longer hours, earn less money and have less formal job experience than men. Gender inequalities in employment and wages also have implications for future generations—if parents view daughters as less likely to earn wages, then they are less likely to invest in their daughters’ education, contributing to the creation of a cycle of inequality.
Ways to Give
WORLD NEIGHBORS AND WOMEN'S LABOR
In many of the countries where World Neighbors works, being born female is “unlucky.” It’s no wonder – women perform two-thirds of the world’s work hours yet receive only 10 percent of the income and own less than 1 percent of the land. Globally, but especially in developing nations, there is a huge discrepancy between what women give through labor and what they receive in return. In almost every developing country, women have less power, autonomy and money while at the same time more work and responsibility.
World Neighbors recognizes that giving women a voice through inclusion at all levels of planning and development decision-making is important if gender equality is to be gained, but often women are too consumed by the amount of work that must be done that they simply do not have the time to participate. World Neighbors works with communities to reduce the amount of labor women perform and to make the division of labor more equitable between the sexes.
Addressing women’s workloads is a critical part of World Neighbors early work with villages. In many partner communities, it is unrealistic to assume that the many problems women face – lack of education, poor health or lack of economic opportunities – can be fixed without first looking at the unequal division of labor in the community.
One of the activities World Neighbors staff help facilitate for partner communities is the 24-Hour Activity Calendar. In this activity, women make a chart that depicts their activities during a typical day and another chart to describe those of a man’s workday. Similarly, men are asked to create their own chart and one for the women. After the charts are complete, men and women discuss together the similarities and differences between the charts.
The discussion of the activity charts generates information that can increase the awareness of gender-related problems. Facilitators of this activity generally find that women tend to create the charts quite easily, but men take a bit longer. Often women’s charts are more detailed than men’s. These factors demonstrate that women typically have a greater level of awareness about gender divisions within their community.
Ways to Give
Moreover, men are surprised to find that the average woman’s workday is 2 to 3 hours longer than a man’s and consists of 1.5 to 2 times as many tasks. In contrast to the stereotypical view that the activities performed by women are less physically demanding, the men are also shocked to see that many chores performed by women are labor-intensive. For example, a single trip to and from the water source can take as long as 4 hours and bring in 20 liters of water for the family.
Community members who participate in World Neighbors programs have repeatedly cited that gender trainings, such as the 24-Hour Activity Calendar, result in improved household communication and cooperation. The trainings provide a space to discuss gender roles, which, in turn, has a significant personal impact. Quality of life as well as family relations are improved. Many community members come to accept discussion between spouses as an integral part of decision-making and value women’s roles in this process as a result of gender trainings.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
GET INVOLVED
By volunteering with World Neighbors or making a donation to WOW! you support the holistic, integrated work that World Neighbors does around the world involving education, health and nutrition, which keeps women at the center of solutions.
WOW! also offers the following advocacy opportunities:
Ask your representatives to support ratification of The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW is the most complete international agreement on basic rights for women. As of April 2007, the Treaty has been ratified by 185 countries. The United States played an important role in drafting this treaty but now is only one in eight countries that has yet to ratify it. Write to your senator or help circulate a petition.
Help end global poverty
The Global Poverty Act would direct the U.S. President and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to create and implement a comprehensive strategy to reduce poverty worldwide. It would ensure that U.S. foreign policy includes implementation of the Millenium Development Goals set forth by the United Nations to alleviate poverty and promote long-term sustainable development, to improve people's lives and the health of our environment.
LEARN MORE
Kanji, Nazneen and Kalyani Menon-Sen. “What Does the Feminisation of Labour Mean for Sustainable Livelihoods?” World Summit on Sustainable Development. (2001). Available online at: http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdf/full/11006IIED.pdf
“Global Employment Trends for Women 2007: ILO Study Warns on the Feminization of Working Poverty.” World of Work Magazine. No. 59. April 2007. Available online at: http://www.ilo.org/wow/Newsbriefs/lang--en/WCMS_082692
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). United Nations. Gender and Food Security. Available online at: http://www.fao.org/Gender/gender.htm
United Nations Children’s Fund. Gender Equality. “Inequality in employment.” Available online at: http://www.unicef.org/sowc07/profiles/inequality_employment.php
United Nations Development Fund for Women. Progress of the World’s Women: Women, Work, and Poverty. (2005) Available online at:
http://www.unifem.org/resources/item_detail.php?ProductID=48
United Nations Population Fund. State of World Population: People, Poverty and Possibilities. (2002). Available online at:
http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2002/english/ch4/page3.htm
A WOW! e-Brief
Work of Women @ World Neighbors
April 2008
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