By Leilah Bbaale
Gender advocates are calling for the redistribution of care work among men and women to reduce the amount of time women spent on unpaid work.
Care work such as caring for children, the sick, the elderly, and performing domestic chores is largely done by women while men dominate the money economy.
Patricia Munabi Babiiha, the Executive Director of the Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE) says that unequal distribution of unpaid work limits women’s participation in the labor market and affects their productivity in the money economy.
Data from the International Labor Organization-ILO indicates that women spend 4.1 times more time than men in Asia and the Pacific on unpaid care work. According to a 2018 survey by the Uganda National Bureau of Statistics-UNBS, men spend over 5.3 hours on productive work while women lag at 3.4 hours of productive work daily.
