What is unpaid female labour worth?: Evidence from the Time Use Surveys of Iran in 2008 and 2009

M (Mahmoud) Meskoub; Nader Mehri; Mahmood  Ghazi-Tabatabai

doi:10.32797/jtur-2021-1

What is unpaid female labour worth? Evidence from the Time Use Surveys of Iran in 2008 and 2009

M (Mahmoud) Meskoub^*, Nader Mehri, Mahmood Ghazi-Tabatabai

^*Corresponding author for this work

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Abstract

We have used the urban Time Use Surveys of Iran (TUSI) of 2008 and 2009, several Iranian censuses and our own national survey of the wages of care workers and private tutors to provide the first national estimates of the monetary value of unpaid domestic work of married urban housewives. TUSI covered only urban areas. Urban married housewives carried out most of the care work and home education of children. Adopting a market-based approach, we estimate this unpaid work to be worth US$26 billion in 2008 and US$29 billion in 2009 comprising 8.6% of non-oil GDP in both years. These figures are underestimates because rural women, non-housewife urban women and urban unmarried women are not included in our study. Such unrecorded contributions to national output have important social policy implications because various social policy measures and especially social insurance policies do not cover married housewives in their own right but as dependents of their husbands. Providing a monetary estimate of their unpaid work makes their contribution to the economy visible that should lead to the provision of social insurance against basic contingencies of life such as has health problems, poverty, disabilities and support in old age.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1-18
Number of pages	18
Journal	Journal of Time Use Research
Volume	16
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.32797/jtur-2021-1
Publication status	Published - 31 Dec 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We greatly benefitted from the comments of the three anonymous referees and the editor of the JTUR. We would also like to acknowledge the administrative and academic support of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Tehran (project number: 3105012/1/01). Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the annual conference of the Iranian International Economic Association (2013, Istanbul, Turkey) and research seminar series of Iranian Sociological Association (2015, Tehran, Iran). We would also like to thank participants at these events for their comments. Alas, any remaining errors are ours!

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), 2021.

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Cite this

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title = "What is unpaid female labour worth?: Evidence from the Time Use Surveys of Iran in 2008 and 2009 ",

abstract = "We have used the urban Time Use Surveys of Iran (TUSI) of 2008 and 2009, several Iranian censuses and our own national survey of the wages of care workers and private tutors to provide the first national estimates of the monetary value of unpaid domestic work of married urban housewives. TUSI covered only urban areas. Urban married housewives carried out most of the care work and home education of children. Adopting a market-based approach, we estimate this unpaid work to be worth US$26 billion in 2008 and US$29 billion in 2009 comprising 8.6% of non-oil GDP in both years. These figures are underestimates because rural women, non-housewife urban women and urban unmarried women are not included in our study. Such unrecorded contributions to national output have important social policy implications because various social policy measures and especially social insurance policies do not cover married housewives in their own right but as dependents of their husbands. Providing a monetary estimate of their unpaid work makes their contribution to the economy visible that should lead to the provision of social insurance against basic contingencies of life such as has health problems, poverty, disabilities and support in old age.",

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