Peruvian Women are Overburdened with Caregiving
HAVANA TIMES – Elda Novoa’s only alternative was to give up her career and find other ways to earn the money to take care of her family, especially her son with special needs. Otherwise, this 61-year-old Peruvian woman simply didn’t have time to cover her multiple responsibilities.
“My son Flavio is 31, but he needs help fending for himself. I take him to his weekly speech, physical, and occupational therapies, but there are times when I can’t, because of economic strains and lack of time,” she told IPS during a walk through the streets near her home, located in the Lima neighborhood of San Miguel.
Characterized as a middle class district, San Miguel is one of the Peruvian capital’s 43 districts, within a South American country of 34 million people where nearly a third of the population lives in poverty and informal employment prevails.
Among the persistent inequalities in the country is the use of time by women and men. Like Elda Novoa, the female population of Peru invests many more hours than men in unpaid domestic and caregiving activities, which provide vital social support but lack recognition and remuneration.
The results of the second National Survey on the Use of Time, presented in March, show that this inequality has remained unchanged with respect to the findings of the first survey, conducted in 2010, which first made visible the excessive demands on women’s time.
According to the survey, women reduced their participation in unpaid work by 38 minutes and men by six, but women still spend more than twice as much time as men on various unpaid household and family tasks: five hours and 41 minutes, as opposed to men’s two hours and 9 minutes.
The care chain is feminized
Although many years have elapsed between the two surveys, the results corroborate the same general trends, states Susana Osorio, an economist and Impact and Influence director at Save the Children Peru.
“Although we see an increase in men’s involvement with some domestic and caregiving activities, women’s time [spent on these] has not decreased; we continue to devote many hours a week to these tasks,” she said.
Fourteen years after the first Use of Time survey, “no progress has been made in the establishment of equal responsibility for care, which confronts us women with many obstacles to our personal and professional projects,” the expert told IPS. She spoke to us from the international organization’s head office in Lima, where they focus on attending to children’s rights.
Osorio, who holds a master’s degree in gender studies, said that feminist economics has already established that if the state and the private sector do not resolve care needs, they effectively transfer them to families, as is the case in Peru.
“What happens in this context of a care crisis is that families must assume much more of this work, hence their household economies become shakier. And within the family, those who disproportionately bear these responsibilities are women,” Susana Osorio remarked.
The gender gap in the use of time begins at an early age. The survey included the population as young as 12, in which unequal responsibilities for girls and boys are already marked, especially on weekends when the girls help their mothers for longer periods of time.
“We found that the chain of care is still highly feminized. Within families, those who are involved in caregiving are usually mothers, grandmothers, sisters,” Osorio analyzed.
She added: “We women have two alternatives to resolve the problem of care: dedicate our own time or outsource it. However, the latter requires sufficient funds to allow the transference of responsibilities to different services offered in the market, or to support networks that are also usually made up of women.”
A difficult battle
Elda Novoa appears serene despite her difficulties. She asked to talk to IPS outside her home, as she does not feel comfortable sharing her living conditions. Her home is a paternal inheritance shared with her siblings, where she lives with her three children – a 33-year-old daughter, a son who is 31, and the youngest son, 29 – and three young grandchildren.
“The way the cost of living is, my children still haven’t been able to branch out on their own. My daughter is an economist and the youngest is a construction worker, but what they earn is only enough to support their families and save a little. Whenever I can, I help them by taking care of my grandchildren, because sometimes they come home late because of work,” she expressed.
Elda’s daily workday begins at 6:00 a.m. and doesn’t end until after midnight. In those 18 hours she prepares breakfast, takes one of her grandchildren to daycare, cleans the common areas of the house, goes grocery shopping, cooks, picks up her grandson, serves lunch and cleans the kitchen, washes and hangs out the clothes, buys supplies for the desserts she sells on order, prepares snacks and bakes the empanadas, alfajores or cake that people have ordered.
This heavy load of responsibilities includes the care of Flavio, the second of her children, who was born with mild cerebral palsy. He cannot walk and uses a wheelchair, and he also has learning difficulties. Her care involves helping him get dressed and bathe every day and transporting him to one of the National Rehabilitation Institute centers, where for some months she’s been taking him for different therapies three times a week.
“I’m the sole person responsible for him. I separated from the father of my children when they were small because he wasn’t committed to the family, nor did he help economically. I abandoned the career of business accountant because I needed to be constantly with Flavio,” she recalled.
In this battle, her elder daughter has been a big help, working part-time jobs since the time she was a teenager to contribute economically to the household. In addition, her daughter took a baking and pastry class to have another source of income. Now she works as an economist and has stopped those other activities.
“Now I’m the one who makes the pastries,” Novoa noted.
Her most urgent need right now is obtaining enough money to exchange her son’s wheelchair, since at 5 feet 3” and almost 192 lbs., he requires a new one. She also needs to guarantee the continuity of his therapies, for which she needs to contract with a private mobility service.
Her minimum monthly budget to cover the taxis plus her and Flavio’s basic needs is 1500 Peruvian soles, equivalent to a little over US $410 dollars. When she can’t put together that amount, they have to pause the therapies and whatever progress he’s achieved stagnates or regresses.
“Unfortunately, there’s not much awareness about these needs and much of the burden is put on us as mothers – not only by the state authorities, but also by my own family. To avoid conflict, I don’t obligate my other children to help out. Besides, they have their own responsibilities,” she reflected.
However, she’s not giving up her dream of having her own pastry business, where Flavio could participate in customer service. “I want him to be able to fend for himself, I won’t always be by his side,” she added.
Public policies are lacking
Susana Osorio argued that the grave differences in the time spent by men and women in paid work versus unpaid caregiving have a structural basis, hence redistribution strategies would not be enough to correct it.
“Redistribution not only implies permanent negotiation, but also decisions constructed from a base of power.” She continued: “there exists this empty discourse that the poor are poor because they want to be, or that women are the caregivers because they like doing it, when there’s a social mandate tied to the exercise of femininity and maternity that runs through everything and is regulated by other systems like gender violence for example.”
She pointed out that not only is it not easy for women to find a partner willing to assume equal responsibility for care, but the negotiation process itself subjects them to the risk of violence.
“That’s why we say it’s structural, because it’s not a matter of reforming one or two little things, but is rooted in the way we‘ve organized ourselves socially,” she explained.
She hopes that the results of the Time Use survey can help loosen the concept of care as the exclusive responsibility of women, and move towards viewing it as a social responsibility – not only of families or even shared with men, but also with a role for the State in guaranteeing the protection of rights and for the private sector as a source of employment, all moving towards a horizon of shared responsibility.
And in this, to consider the special care needs posed by people with disabilities and the elderly.
“We are a country that is aging, with a gap in social protection. Over 70% of our workers have only informal employment. Most people are not enrolled in social security or pension plans and as such also lack comprehensive health insurance to accompany us as we transition to the life of an older adult,” Susana Osorio warned.
First published ion Spanish by IPS and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.