Gender-Equitable Public Investment: How Time-Use Surveys Can Help

Abstract

Macroeconomic policy often fails to recognise the disproportionate burden of unpaid care work on women, and as a result reinforces both gender and income inequalities. By providing detailed information on how this burden is unequally distributed across gender, class, ethnicity and other socioeconomic characteristics, time-use data can help in guiding more equitable allocations of public resources and promoting government budget priorities that recognise the importance of unpaid work, both for the economy and for human wellbeing.