Vietnamese women spend an average of 4. That translates to 32 hours per week or working days per year, based on a working day of eight hours. Paid and unpaid work by age. The number is even more staggering for women from the H'mong ethnic minority group, who spend an average of seven hours a day on unpaid labor, two hours more than their male counterparts and nearly three hours more than women from the Kinh majority ethnic group in Vietnam.
Most of the time is spent on housework, caring for family and collecting fuel and water, chores that would be less arduous with better access to infrastructure and public services.
ActionAid researchers asked participants from nine cities and provinces across Vietnam to keep track of their paid and unpaid work from January to June Dong said that men in Cao Bang would never do housework. They leave home for days on end to work in far-flung areas, leaving the household chores to their wives and mothers.
But keeping track of their time has made the women realize how consumed they are with unpaid work while their men are out earning money, drinking and watching TV, a luxury they can rarely afford. Regardless of their education, women are still subjected to the same social norms and expected to carry the little varying numbers of unpaid care work hours.
Unpaid care work by levels of education. Pham Phuong Chi, a lecturer at Vietnam's Women Academy, admitted at the conference her hours of child care are not much less than women in mountainous areas. Researchers believe if the work was equally shared, women would have more time to do paid work and enjoy recreation, while public services would reduce the burden for both genders. The most read Vietnamese newspaper. Follow us on.
