Changing Views on women’s work with a gender focus

According to the Economic Research Center of the UANL, 63.4 percent of women aged 18 or older in Nuevo León consider home-based work as their primary occupation.

On average, women dedicate twice as many hours to unpaid domestic work compared to men.

Hence, Joana Cecilia Chapa Cantú, a researcher and economist at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, has proposed several strategies to address this challenging situation for the female population.

These measures encompass sustaining the battle against labor discrimination, encouraging training in digital tool utilization, challenging teleworking paradigms, implementing public policies to enhance formality, and advocating for a comprehensive care system.

Why does domestic work hold economic value?
To provide context on the significance of the economic value of domestic work, the director of the School of Economics at UANL offered an example. Consider a scenario where a housewife, who is also an engineer, spends an hour preparing food for her family. In doing so, she incurs an opportunity cost.

She could have utilized that hour in the labor market and earned the wage for an hour as an engineer. Conversely, if the housewife opts not to prepare the food, she would then need to pay the market value for one hour of a cook’s services”.

Joana Cecilia Chapa Cantú

On November 27, Dr. Joana Chapa Cantú participated in the colloquium “In Search of Gender Equality: Dialogues on the Elimination of Violence against Women” at UANL. She delivered a presentation titled “Economic Research with a Gender Perspective.