Time use studies aim to provide information on the work performed by women and highlight the time they spend on unpaid activities including domestic chores, the care of children, the elderly and the sick, water and fuel collection, and voluntary community-oriented work. In so doing, they seek to address the problem of the ‘invisibility’ of women’s unpaid work, and draw attention to the amount of time women spend engaged in activities that often go under recorded (or not recorded at all) in labour and household surveys. Time use studies from around the world have shown that women work longer hours than men when both paid and unpaid work is taken into consideration, but that much of their work remains undervalued because it is unpaid. Although the importance of better understanding women’s time use is now widely recognised, to date few time use surveys have been conducted in developing countries.
