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The recently approved Classification of Time-Use Activities for Latin America (CAUTAL) enables countries to obtain a comprehensive and organized view of the activities that people carry out and the time they dedicate to each of these, providing in this way inputs and evidence for the formulation of public policies on gender equality.
This tool for planning, processing, presenting and analyzing time-use surveys was adopted during the eighth meeting of the Statistical Conference of the Americas (SCA) of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), which took place in Quito, Ecuador on November 17-19, 2015.
The CAUTAL is the result of extensive work on the part of the SCA’s Working Group on Gender Statistics, led by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography with the support of ECLAC, UN Women and Mexico's National Institute of Women, and it responds to the need for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to have an instrument with a gender focus that is also suited to the regional context and that allows for the harmonization and standardization of time-use surveys.
SCA’s Working Group on Gender Statistics comprises Argentina, Bahamas, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Dominican Republic and Venezuela.
In recent years information-gathering on this topic has increased in Latin America, to the point where today 18 countries in the region have at least one measurement of the time used for domestic and unpaid care work.
The consensuses reached by governments in the various meetings of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean—a subsidiary body of ECLAC that convenes periodically—have increased country commitments regarding the carrying out of these surveys and the construction of a satellite account of unpaid household work.
As the conceptual framework of the CAUTAL sets forth, unpaid work involves domestic and care activities that household members carry out for the well-being and reproduction of everyone in the home. This kind of work is done mainly by women.
“The sexual division of labour current in the societies of Latin America remains a structural factor in the inequalities and injustices affecting women in the family, the labour market and political participation, making it vital to have measuring instruments that can show the distribution of the tasks required for life in society, in both the public and private spheres”, the approved document states.
The CAUTAL has been defined as a dynamic and flexible instrument, which seeks to respond to the demands of the classification of surveys as well as to the socioeconomic characteristics of each country so that their measurements may be relevant.
