CSW63 Parallel event: ‘It’s slavery’ why time matters for gender-sensitive, multidimensional poverty measurement

A woman works in a field. Much of women’s work is informal and uncounted. Alice Floyd / IWDA

Time is an important and finite resource, and time-use is highly gendered. Women do more unpaid work than men, and work more hours in total when both paid and unpaid work are counted. Tasks associated with caring for others, cooking and cleaning, and the collection of water, food and fuel for the home disproportionately fall to women and girls.

This parallel event at the 63rd Commission on the Status of Women (CSW63) will explore time-use and excessive labour burden, its impact on women’s lives and why time-use matters for understanding multidimensional poverty.

Lily Be’Soer, Voice for Change (VfC) Director, will discuss findings from a VfC study on violence against women and girls in Jiwaka Province, Papua New Guinea. Women’s daily burden of work was identified by women as the most serious form of violence they experienced.

Joanne Crawford, from the IWDA Individual Deprivation Measure team will share how this ground-breaking new tool measures multidimensional poverty and deprivation at the individual level to reveal its gendered dimensions, including insights into disparity within the household.