New Delhi (NVI): Women spend on average about 12.5 billion hours every day working for free as compared to men globally, according to a new report published by the United Nations Development.
“For unpaid care work, women bear a bigger burden by spending about 2.5 times more than men do,” a report says adding that this affects women’s labour force participation, which is consistently lower than for men, both globally and by human development grouping.
Gender inequality within households and communities is characterized by inequality across multiple dimensions, with a vicious cycle of powerlessness, stigmatization, discrimination, exclusion and material deprivation all reinforcing each other, the new findings from the Gender Social Norms Index suggest.
In 2018 the global labour force participation rate was around 75 percent for men and 48 percent for women, it says.
Most of the times professional women have just two options for their personal partners—a super-supportive partner or no partner at all. Husbands are considered as a key factor in two-thirds of women’s decisions to quit the workforce, often because women had to fill the parenting vacuum, it further added.
In other instances, the struggle to reconcile care work with paid work can lead women to occupational downgrading. Additionally, skilled women, who are more likely to participate in the labor market, face social norms that make them less attractive potential partners in the marriage market, the report says.
This contributes towards a lower marriage rate for skilled women, and might induce a nonlinear relationship between their labor market prospects and their marriage outcomes, the report added.
