Ashwin Varghese

A time use sheet, when filled reflectively, can be a potent tool to learn about gender and privilege. I was privy to this exercise during a WISCOMP workshop on Gender and Higher Education held at Kanya Maha Vidyala, Jalandhar.

Time-Use Surveys are a methodological tool deployed to decipher in detail the daily activities of respondents i.e. what kind of daily activities take up how much of their time on a daily basis. This is typically done by filling a time sheet which is divided into hours, covering a 24-hour period. Respondents are then asked to fill the time sheet, in as great detail as possible. This looks more like a detailed time table for the entire day.

During the workshop, we were asked to fill such a time sheet, and we were given sample time sheets of other respondents. My biggest takeaway from this exercise was, how much of my daily activities such as fieldwork, coursework, and other university/research related activities, relied on a plethora of domestic, unpaid work, that is crucial in sustaining all other activities.  

In a family setup, the burden of this domestic, unpaid work inevitably falls on the women of the household. Marx and Engels in discussing the reproduction of labour power, i.e. the ability of the individual worker to replenish their ability to work, had discussed how this includes resting, eating etc. (Rubin, 2011). Marxist-feminist critics like Gayle Rubin (2011), had argued that these activities (eating, resting, etc.) which are instrumental in replenishing labour power, also involve work such as cooking, cleaning, washing etc. The burden of this work, as can be seen from most family setups, falls on the women of the household. However, in common parlance, public policy and accounting practices, it is not considered work or economic activity, rather a woman’s domestic ‘duty’.

Jayati Ghosh (2009) has pointed out that working women face a double burden, where their working status does not alleviate the burden of domestic work. A time-use survey in clear terms shows this double burden. One of these sample time sheets that was shared with us in this exercise was that of a school teacher, whose daily activities, apart from teaching, and school work, included grocery shopping, preparing meals for family, cleaning the house etc., these activities are conspicuously absent from men’s time sheets in general. This however should not be misconstrued as a universally applicable gender phenomenon, here intersectional positions of class, caste, gender, religion, sexuality etc. change the nature and burden of domestic work and gender roles.

Such comparisons, for respondents, can have a transformative potential, in terms of at least acknowledging one’s own privilege/burden. In conclusion, looking at its transformative potential one wonders whether this methodological tool, can also be used as a pedagogical tool, especially in higher education institutions, to acknowledge and discuss multiple gender roles and their daily manifestations, in both the domestic sphere and higher educational spaces.

References

Ghosh, Jayati. 2009. Never Done and Poorly Paid: Women’s Work in Globalising India. Delhi: Women Unlimited.

Rubin, Gayle. 1990. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex.” In Women, Class and the Feminist Imagination, edited by Karen Hansen and Ilene Philipson, 74-113. Philadelphia: Temple.