Abstract
This chapter investigates the gendered impact of the Great Recession on paid and unpaid work time of prime age women and men workers in Canada. Based upon data from the Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey (LFS) and General Social Survey (GSS) 2010, the chapter demonstrates that the Great Recession had not only gendered impacts on paid work but also had gendered impacts on unpaid housework and care work. The evidence provides supports for five hypotheses: the Great Recession is a he-cession; is associated with a he-recovery; included an added worker effect for women; increased unpaid work of women and men; and the increase inunpaid work was greater for women than men.
The author would like to thank Tenley Pearce for excellent research assistance and Paul Bowles, Rachel Connelly, Olagoke Akintolao, Marjorie Griffin Cohen, and participants in a session at the IAFFE Conference, Galway, June 2016, for constructive comments.
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Notes
- 1.
Estimates are based upon time use surveys from these countries. The data refer to different years over the period 1998 to 2009 and thus, may reflect differences in the business cycle and different data collection methodologies. The amounts of time are reported per day and averaged over the 7-day week.
- 2.
The argument that men’s unpaid work time does not increase much as women’s paid work increases is also supported by analysis of cross-country female employment rates and amounts of unpaid work time. Miranda (2011: Fig. 6) shows that the correlation between women’s employment rate and unpaid work time is greater than women’s employment rate and men’s unpaid work time.
- 3.
A pilot survey was undertaken in 2014 and a 2015 survey is planned for release in the fall 2017.
- 4.
General information about the time use surveys is available at http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&Id=217657.
- 5.
From the GSS 2010, paid work is calculated here as the sum of WORKPAID, DURO900, and OTHRPAID.
- 6.
Unpaid work is distinguished from leisure using the third-party criterion which means that if a third-party can be hired to perform the task then it is considered unpaid work.
- 7.
From the GSS 2010, unpaid work is calculated here as the sum of the variables COOKDOMS, HSKPDOMS, MAINDOMS, OTHRDOMS, SHOPDOMS, CHLDDOMS, and VLNTORGN.
- 8.
In using the GSS 2010 public use microdata file, being employed is defined as MAR_Q100=1 and LFSGSS=1 or 2; employed full-time is MAR_Q100=1 and LFSGSS=1; employed part-time is MAR_Q100=1 and LFSGSS=2; unemployed is MAR_Q100=3 and LFSGSS=5; and not in the labor force is MAR_Q100=5, 6, 7, 9 or 10 and LFSGSS=5.
- 9.
While there are no official dates for business cycles in Canada, the Conference Board of Canada, recently published a report outlining a method using a combination of “duration, amplitude and scope” of the downtown for measuring business cycles and providing dates for this recent and previous recessions (Cross and Bergevin 2012). The Bank of Canada (2011: 1) reports that by early 2011, “employment and economic activity have surpassed their pre-recession levels”.
- 10.
Cross and Bergevin (2012: Table 1.4) report that the percentage change in real GDP and real GDP per capita were negative in each of these three quarters; the start of the recovery is marked by a positive percentage change in quarterly GDP and zero change for quarterly GDP per capita, for the third quarter of 2009, July through September 2009.
- 11.
The recession in the early 1990s lasted for 26 months and was associated with declines in real GDP per capita between quarters of between minus 0.1 percent near the trough and minus 1.4 percent (Cross and Bergevin 2012: Table 13).
- 12.
National Bureau of Economic Research. US Business Cycle Expansions and Contractions. http://www.nber.org/cycles.html.
- 13.
The amount of unpaid work for the population 15 years and over reflect the average across different types of households, such as married (and common-law) households of different types (such as dual earners/dual caregivers, male breadwinner), as well as non-partnered individuals. The averages are also aggregated over households with and without children.
- 14.
Over the past 30 years, there has been progress toward gender equality in paid work, measured by a declining gender gap in annual employment rates and average weekly hours of paid work. The gender employment rate gap narrowed from 20 percentage points in 1985 to 8 percentage points in 2015 (an average decline of 0.4 percentage points per year) (see Appendix, Fig. A1). Since the mid-1990s, the gender gap in average weekly hours declined slowly, primarily as a result of a decline in men’s average weekly work hours (see Appendix, Fig. A2).
- 15.
Calculated from the number employed by industrial sector, by sex, and year, based on CANSIM Table 282-0008.
- 16.
The approach of Kaya Bahçe and Memiş (2013) may be fruitful in this endeavor.
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Appendix
Appendix
Employment rates, women and men, 1985–2015
Source: Compiled from CANSIM Table 282-0002
Average weekly hours worked (all jobs), women and men, 1985–2015
Source: Compiled from CANSIM Table 282-0018
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MacPhail, F. (2017). Paid and Unpaid Work Time by Labor Force Status of Prime Age Women and Men in Canada: The Great Recession and Gender Inequality in Work Time. In: Connelly, R., Kongar, E. (eds) Gender and Time Use in a Global Context. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56837-3_5
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