Work intensity is defined as activity in relation to the capacity for that work. It is a topic that affects developed and developing countries in different ways. There are many aspects to work intensity including multitasking, time poverty, health implications, and policy considerations. Multitasking is the overlap of many activities, usually care and informal work, that negatively impacts the livelihood of people, especially women, in the developing world. Time poverty is defined as the lack of time for leisure and rest activities after time spent working. High work intensity coupled with multitasking and time poverty has a negative correlation with health outcomes. Work intensity is seldom considered when proposing new policy and legislation. As more women enter the workforce, work intensity and its implications are being brought to the forefront of policy, development, and empowerment debates.
Multitasking Due to the nature of work intensity and multitasking, women tend to be more affected than men. Work intensity is amplified by multitasking as women put forth more effort per unit of time through the performance of two or more tasks simultaneously. Women assume productive, reproductive, and managing roles in their communities, thus the demand for their time is greater. Each role requires a different amount of intensity, and the magnitude of the amount of work that women in the developing world complete is often disregarded. Current time use data and research ignores the multiplicity of roles and duties performed by women in developing nations, thus, the extent in which women multitask is vastly underreported. This creates an unfair distribution of work between men and women as women chiefly deal with the functioning of the familial unit. While multitasking and its effects influence all socioeconomic classes, the lower, working classes tend to bear the burden of its distresses. Multitasking, more often than not, is used to mitigate the effects of low incomes. Families that cannot afford other means to take care of the daily ins and outs of running a household rely on women to complete everyday chores and care. In addition, families suffering from poverty are more likely to have both parents work, compounding the amount of labor done by women. However, the alternative to multitasking can leave women and their families in deeper poverty. Economists are beginning to take note of the importance of correctly quantifying multitasking by looking at the role of care and unpaid work. Care work, done predominantly by women, is a main component of multitasking. Care work includes, but is not limited to, caring for children, the elderly, partners, and oneself. Unpaid work, while it includes care work, also includes activities such as cooking, cleaning, and fetching water. There is an enormous overlap between childcare and multitasking, leading to a never ending workday for many women. If employed, she returns from her job and is again put to work cooking, cleaning, and caring for others in her household. Women complete over sixty percent of unpaid household work, which is almost never factored into any productive measure and overlooked.
Time poverty
Time poverty is defined as the lack of time for leisure and rest activities after time spent working. As women often serve productive, reproductive, and managing roles in their communities they are more likely to be time poor than men as their time is spread out over many activities. Especially in rural areas, women tend to work more hours than men although the time work gap varies by country. Additionally, there is a correlation between time and income poverty which further widens the time and income gap between men and women. It is the combination of informal domestic work on top of market labor that puts women at a disadvantage. Unfortunately, the alternative to being time poor is even deeper consumption poverty. This grim alternative leaves women with no other choice than to be incessantly working, often on several projects at once (internal link to multitasking). Time poverty and multitasking are extremely interconnected in that women are so time impoverished that they must do many tasks simultaneously. In household units, women are more likely to make sacrifices for the rest of the family. In sacrificing their time for more work, women are less healthy, poorly rested, and have diminished capabilities. The feminization of labor can be seen as partly responsible for the time impoverishment of women in developing countries. Joining the formal labor market means that women have more work to do in addition to the informal care work already done within the home. As women are often paid lower wages than men, the feminization of labor contributes to income inequality and thus general gender inequality. This leaves women with few options: find gainful employment and thus increase bargaining power while at the same time becoming more time poor, or slide further into consumption poverty. This lack of leisure time reduces the capabilities of women who are time poor. One of the ten essential human capabilities Martha Nussbaum lists in her 2004 article on women's capabilities is play, which is the capability to enjoy life and all that it has to offer. Women who are time poor are severely deficient in the play capability. As development policy slowly transitions from an income-based approach to one that is capability-based, the reduction of capabilities in time impoverished women becomes increasingly important.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
