Women Work 4 More Years Than Men in Their Lifetimes
This isn’t exactly great news for womenkind (but it’s also probably not a revelation at all). If you’re a young woman hitting the job market today, you can expect to do an average of four years more work than men your age over your lifetime. According to a new report, women around the world will spend an extra month on labor a year, reports The Guardian.
Charity ActionAid presented the report, Not Ready, Still Waiting, to the United Nations general assembly on Thursday.
“ActionAid believes women’s unpaid work should be recognized, reduced and redistributed — between women and men, and between the household and the state,” Girish Menon, chief executive of ActionAid UK told The Guardian. “Women’s labor — in and outside the home — is vital to sustainable development and for the well-being of society. Without the subsidy it provides, the world economy would not function. Yet it is undervalued and for the most part invisible.”
Care work, or “women’s work” as it’s sometimes known, includes maintaining a household, caring for children, sick people and the elderly. It also means cooking, cleaning, and in developing countries, it can mean long treks collecting water and firewood. In Africa and Asia women (and children) walk an average of 3.7 miles a day to collect water.
The report highlights that not enough progress has been made to create and launch policies tackling inequality since the UN sustainable development goals were agreed a year ago, and argues that women will continue to experience inequality until the disproportionate levels of care work are reduced.
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