By IANS/EFE,
Puebla (Mexico) : The domestic labour done by women in Mexico is equal to 23 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, more than the value of oil exports or manufactured goods, said the president of the National Women’s Institute, or Inmujeres, Rocio Garcia Gaytan.
At the inauguration of the seventh National Meeting of Rural, Indigenous and Peasant Women held in the central city of Puebla as part of the International Day of Rural Women, Garcia expressed her regret about the lack of remuneration for the work of cleaning and looking after family members that women do in the home.
Mexico, she said, is the first country in the region to make a study to determine the approximate cost of the unpaid work done in the family, a research project that was completed last month with the aid of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, or Inegi.
The head of the state agency Inmujeres said that domestic labor includes “the care of senior adults and sick children who are not hospitalised, attending people with some disability, washing, going to get firewood, cleaning and in general taking care of the family”.
By far the greatest part of this domestic labor is done by women, she said.
The official believes that the results obtained by researching the value of domestic labor in Mexico (23 percent of GDP) should reflect the situation in other Latin American countries “from Mexico to Chile and Argentina”.
Garcia said that she will soon formally present the conclusions of the Inegi study.
On his part, the secretary of agrarian reform in Mexico, Abelardo Escobar Prieto, said that 80 percent of the 37,000 productive projects in the country supported by that state agency are headed by women.
Promoting the work of women in the most marginalised communities is the only way to achieve a “break with the cycles of poverty that oppress us”, he said.
Escobar also stressed how vital it is for thousands of peasant women in the country to regularise with the authorities the ownership of land they occupy through deeds.