Time Use Studies

1. Design of Training Curriculum for Capacity Building in Time Use Surveys for a Complete Measurement of the Economy to promote Gender Justice

(On-going project)

Sponsored by : International Training Centre of ILO, Turin (Italy) And ILO Geneva.

Project Associates : The international expert team involved in this project includes (arranged alphabetically)

  1. Dr. Rania Antonopoulos, Co-director, GEM IWG and Principle Instructor, Knowledge Networking Programme, GEM IWG; and Research Scholar and Director, Gender Equality and the Economy Programme. The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College,
  2. Dr. Jacques Charmes, Professor of Economics, Director of Department of Social and Health Sciences, Institute of Research for development (IRD), France (He has been Advisor on TUS in several African countries),
  3. Dr. Valeria Esquevel, Instructor, GEM IWG and Investigadora Docente, Instituto de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Argentina,
  4. Dr. Kimberly Fisher, Secretary – Treasurer of International Association for Time Use Research; and Member of Core Team, Center for Time Use Research (CTUR), Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, UK,
  5. Dr. Margerita Guerrero, Advisor, Statistics, UN ESCAP, Bangkok, Thailand, formerly Statistician with UN Statistical Division at New York,
  6. Dr Duncan Ironmonger, Director, Households Research Unit, Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics, University of Melbourne, Australia and
  7. Dr. Indira Hirway, Director and Professor of Economics, Centre for Development Alternatives, Ahmedabad (India) and Principle Instructor & Advisor on TUS, Knowledge Networking Programme, GEM IWG

This project is about designing Training Curriculum for Capacity Building in Time Use Surveys for a Complete Measurement of the Economy to promote Gender Justice. This curriculum will be used for designing training programmes on TUS for the member countries of the ILO.

The training curriculum comprises of several modules, such as understanding work for gender justice; introduction to time use statistics; conducting time use surveys; basic time use data analysis; methods of valuing unpaid household service work and voluntary work; time use statistics and macro- modelling and policy objectives of TUS statistics – including gender justice and decent work.

Dr. Indira Hirway of CFDA is coordinating the project.

2. Globalization & Widening Gender Inequality Understanding the Dynamics
Through Time Use Studies.

(On-going study)

Sponsored by : ILO, New Delhi

Project Associates : Dr Varsha Ganguli and Ms Mahua Bannerjee

Our study entitled” Restructuring Production and Labour under Globalization: A Study of Textile and Garment Industry in India” (sponsored by the ILO Sub regional Office, New Delhi) has shown that women’s employment has increased significantly in this export-oriented industry under the liberized trade policies. Globalization of the industry has experted a number of pressures on production units in the industry that have led the units to restructure their production and labour, leading to flexible production and flexible labour use. In this process of flexibilization, workers in general and women workers in particular have suffered in multiple ways. On the one hand

  1. most of the new employment is generated for informal workers,
  2. the wages and working conditions of workers have moved further away from “decent work” conditions, and
  3. the workers are more or less deprived of any social protection; while on the other hand, the conditions of women workers have become worse than those of men workers, with the widening of gender gaps in almost all labour market outcomes. In short, gender inequalities are emerging as a serious concern for our policy makers. How to reduce these inequalities and how to improve access of women to developmental opportunities is a major question that needs an urgent answer.

This project examines the dynamics of these processes with the help of a time use survey. It examines

  1. why women suffer from inferior status and why there are wide and widening gender gaps in major labour market outcomes,
  2. why these gender gaps get accentuated under the policies of globalization, and
  3. what kind of policy interventions are needed to promote gender equalities in the labour market?

3. Time Use Surveys and Public Employment Guarantee Programmes: Understanding the Linkages in Developing Countries.

(Complete 2006)

Sponsoring Agency : Levy Economics Institute, University of New York

Project Team : Prof. Indira Hirway (Project Director), and Mr. Rahul Awade

Collaboration with : CWDS, New Delhi

This paper is a part of the project entitled Pubic Job Guarantee Programmes, and Pro-Poor Development. This study aims at understanding the implications of time use patterns of people, and particularly their unpaid work, for designing of public employment guarantee programmes. The paper documents existing secondary data sources and current research that reveal the amount and types of unpaid work activities that can readily serve as informational bases for public employment creation programmes. The specific objectives of the paper are:

  1. to understand, at the conceptual level, why and how an employment guarantee programme need to integrate paid and unpaid work in its designing,
  2. to examine how far time use surveys can provide the required database for this integration,
  3. to study the available time use statistics in selected developing countries to assess their adequacy for providing information base for the integration,
  4. to analyze the time use data of India and South Africa to identify job categories and the related works / assets that can be undertaken under employment guarantee programmes and
  5. to make recommendations relating to designing and conducting time use surveys for the purpose of getting adequate data base for integrating paid and unpaid work in to employment guarantee programmes.