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Women’s unpaid work is equivalent to 15 percent of Mexico’s gross domestic product, or GDP, excluding labor performed as caregivers and overseeing the household, National Women’s Institute president Lorena Cruz Sanchez said.
“This high economic value of unpaid work done by women could move the country toward sustained development,” Cruz said during a conference Monday in the central Mexican city of Aguascalientes.
Some “60 million of us women are carrying Mexico,” Cruz said at the gathering of international experts.
Women are making this contribution even though they earn “less than men for equal work and when only four of 10 are in the labor force, mainly in the informal market, and when practically half of them live in permanent poverty,” Cruz said.
“Unpaid work is one of the least visible dimensions of women’s contributions to development and the economic survival of households,” Ana Güezmes, the U.N. representative for women in Mexico, said.
Eduardo Sojo, chairman of the board of the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography, or INEGI, said the role of gender in development must be taken into account in the dialogue being promoted by the United Nations on the issue.
The experts attending the conference discussed advances in dealing with the problem of unpaid work.
Published in Latino Daily News