Monday, April 11, 2016

Melinda Gates on Time Poverty

An interesting read is Kirsten Salyer's article in Time Magazine Feb. 23, 2016

Melinda shares her thoughts on time poverty,

Compared to men, women globally spend about twice as much time on unpaid work—labor done for no pay, including cooking, cleaning and caring for children and the elderly. That’s an average about 4.5 hours a day, with the gap between genders ranging from 45 minutes in Scandinavia to five hours in India. In the U.S., where the gap is 90 minutes, if we could put a value on women’s annual unpaid work, it would total about $1.5 trillion.

“We all have 24 hours a day,” Gates says. “It’s kind of funny to me that we’re in 2016, and who decided that women should be the ones to do all this unpaid work? We don’t even call what’s happening at home ‘work.’ Unpaid work is work.”

How do we close the gap? Gates says it would require a three-step approach:

1. Recognize there’s a problem.
2. Reduce it with innovation.
3. Redistribute the work.

I am interested in hearing more about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's upcoming goals in its global mission to reduce poverty.   This year Gates’ focus is on time poverty.

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