Main results of the National Time Use Survey ENUT, January-April 2021

DANE published last July 22 the National Time Use Survey. This instrument shows the distribution and use of time of people over 10 years old in the country, discriminated by gender. This survey is made with the purpose of knowing in which activities people use their time, how many hours they spend, the distribution among types of activities and some questions of perception regarding the use of time. Women continue to have the heaviest burden of unpaid work. In this category are: food provision, cleaning and maintenance, shopping, care of children under 5 years old, support for household members, volunteering, passive care and related activities. In the case of paid work, men continue to participate to a greater extent than women, in this case the gap is 23.7 percentage points, while in the case of unpaid work the gap is 27 percentage points, with a greater burden for women. Even more worrisome is that the ENUT shows that the gaps are not closing over time, perpetuating inequities within households between men and women. Proof of the above is that, while in 2017 89.1% of women did unpaid work, this value went to 90.8% in 2021. For men, the value went from 60% to 63.8%.

When analyzing the relationship between men and women in terms of time dedicated to unpaid work in a disaggregated manner, it is observed that there are no groups of activities in which the proportion of men who perform unpaid work is greater than that of women. Only in the case of purchases and administration, as well as household-related transfers are they developed proportionally between men and women. The highest gap between men and women is in food supply, where 79.3% of women do it and only 32.3% of men, for a difference of 47 percentage points.

In terms of time spent on different activities, men spend about 1 hour and 23 minutes more on paid work. In contrast, women spend 3 hours and 45 minutes more on unpaid work activities. This means that not only are a greater proportion of women engaged in care and household activities, but they also spend more time on them than men. Furthermore, given that the gap is greater for unpaid work than for paid work, this implies that a greater proportion of women have the burden of generating household income and must take care of household and care-related tasks.

These results are reinforced by sets of beliefs that hinder systematic reductions in the gaps, for example, the graph above shows that 16.4% of respondents agree that women are better at domestic work than men and that the proportion of people who strongly agree is 49.6%. This belief is held equally by both men and women.