 to tell you an example from India during the pandemic and the difficulties that it posed to a lot of ordinary people in many parts of the world, including India. One of the experiments that was tried out in the southern state of Kerala was the idea of communal kitchens. Now, that had a big impact on reducing, in fact, the time that women spend cooking, because you're socializing that production. Instead of each family producing their own food, you're cooking for the whole neighborhood. Moreover, men got involved in a much more way. They won't do it in their home. But when it's done in the communal setting, they get involved in washing dishes, transporting the vessels, et cetera, et cetera. So this had a big impact on us. And that is a different way of imagining what life is, what communal life should be. My name is Ajit Sakhariyas, and I'm affiliated with the Levy Economics Institute of Bart College. Part of the standard of living of workers is provided by the domestic unpaid domestic services and caring services by people at home, primarily women. And then this was also a focus of debate during the 1970s and 80s with the growth of socialist feminism in the Western world. So the whole question of domestic labor debate, as it was known. So the literature came. So the part of the limp tip is informed by those debates. Part of it has actually got to do with a much more narrower focus, which is to do with, like, how do we measure poverty? At this point, actually, it was raised by a pretty mainstream economist, Claire Wickery, in the early 1970s, where she had a critique of the US poverty line. Now, the poverty line is basically supposed to tell you what you needed the minimum to have a maintain a socially acceptable standard of living. Now, if you were to survive with that amount of income, Wickery argued, you need someone as a full-time caretaker at home for what? Well, for taking care of the kids, for shopping at the cheapest outlets so that you could live within that limited budget, and doing all the other domestic services that are required to reproduce the household as a unit. So this presupposes that the unpaid working time of women at home, or someone else doing this job. So the poverty line presupposes that. Now, does everyone have the time to do it or not? A lot of working-class families, and she focused on single female-headed households, working-class women who had to raise a family and also earn a living. And then you find that they don't really have the time to do that, to meet this multiple demands on their life. And the conventional poverty measure does not take that into account at all. So this is what we set out to do, again, following Wickery's insight, but using modern methods and also bringing into play the intra-household dimension, the division of labor within the household, very much into focus. So the work is so far being done for Latin America and for Sub-Saharan Africa and then for South Korea and Turkey. Just to give you a broad overview of what the results look like is that, well, first of all, when you do this adjustment for the conventional poverty line, when you adjust it for the time deficits, the monetized value of the time deficits. So we find that poverty is substantially higher. We expect it to be higher because we are going to include in the poverty line some amount of this monetized value of the time deficits. But the extent to which that makes a difference is really dramatic. Like, for example, in the case of South Korea, it almost doubles the official poverty rate. In Mexico, the last estimates that we did was for 2019. And there we find that the increase is from the official rate is, I think, around 45%. And when you take this into account, it jumps to like 55%, 57%. So it's a 10% age point increase, which is a huge amount. So it changes then the picture of poverty, the extent, as well as the depth of poverty, which is typically understood as the gap, the unmet income needs of the population. It widens that too. The second crucial finding is that when you compare working women and working men, and you control for the hours of their employment, that is, you compare women and men who work similar hours. That is at the job, right? You find that women suffer from much higher rate of time poverty than men do from time deficits, right? And the root cause of that is the unequal division of domestic labor between men and women. That's one crucial factor. The other factor is the physical infrastructure, which especially in sub-Saharan African countries like Ghana and Ethiopia that we have studied. It's a crucial factor because you have women or young girls walking several kilometers to fetch water, firewood. A lot of the activities are negatively affected in the amount of time demands because of the poor state of physical infrastructure. But the social infrastructure is also important. What are the care facilities offered for young kids? This is very important. So that's one main finding about this inequality between men and women. Then the third main aspect, and this is where we have done some work using micro simulation techniques to do some thought experiments as to, OK, what happens if women do gain access to employment? How does that change the time and income poverty dynamic? Or what are actually the limits of redistribution of domestic labor within the household? And if you think about that, really, when you talk about a lot of working class poor families, you need both the husband and the wife to work long hours to meet the needs of the family. So how are you going to distribute it equitably? Of course, traditional gender norms and things like that play a big role in passing this double burden to the women. But a lot of times, within the constraints of working class families, there's a limited amount to which this redistribution can take place within the household. So that's one thing. The other thing is that if you have social infrastructure, physical infrastructure, these things you can improve. But again, there are limits to it. A lot of this got to do with the way we conceive of domestic work and how we consider rearing of children, raising of children as responsibilities of individual parents, rather than the old African saying, a village takes a village to raise a kid. So you've got to socialize a lot of these activities. And the extent to which they can be socialized will vary across countries and cultures and so on. But some amount of that has to take place. And to tell you an example from India during the pandemic and the difficulties that it posed to a lot of ordinary people in many parts of the world, including India, one of the experiments that was tried out in the southern state of Kerala was the idea of communal kitchens. Now, that had a big impact on reducing, in fact, the time that women spend cooking, because you're socializing that production. Instead of each family producing their own food, you're cooking for the whole neighborhood. Moreover, men got involved in a much more way. They won't do it in their home. But when it's done in the communal setting, they get involved in washing dishes, transporting the vessels, et cetera, et cetera. So this had a big impact. And that is a different way of imagining what life is, what communal life should be. So a lot of it requires us to actually think beyond the nuclear family, the individualism of capitalism, and what forces it to accept as its natural way of living and a way of raising children. And that has to change too, I think. Part of what we are looking at here is the institution of patriarchy. Again, this study is done for a sub-Saharan Africa collaborative study with myself and colleagues at the Levy Institute as well as colleagues in sub-Saharan Africa. And we are focusing on Ethiopia, Mali, South Africa, Tanzania, and Ghana. Now, one of the interesting things about this is that one factor that influences women's degree of autonomy or their degree of power at what's described as the meso level, the community level has got a lot to do with the strength of patriarchy. Now, by patriarchy, usually what is meant is the, at least in the Western context, is the domination of men over women, right? So, but that is a limited way of thinking about patriarchy when you go to the global south. The reason is that that's only one aspect of the way patriarchy functions in these societies. Another important dimension of access along which patriarchy functions is generational domination. So, patriarchy should be understood not just as women's subordination to men, but also the domination of the parents or the parent-like figures over the younger folks in the household or in the family. And so we construct, I mean, part of the empirical work, this is what I was referring to, is we have built indices of patriarchal power at the meso level, at the community level, right? So what it seeks to capture is this generational domination, the male, female, you know, domination, as well as what can be described as patri locality, which is what the term that the sociologists and the demographers used to describe how young families are tied to the place where their parents live, right? The patri locality of that. And then there's also the institution of son preference. So this is the four accesses along which we are measuring patriarchy, the patriarchal structures. Then there's a whole another domain of patriarchal ideology, which has got to do with attitudes, right? So which, again, we use data from the World Value Survey and the Afro Barometer Survey, which has been extensively utilized by political scientists and others and sociologists to study attitudes. So part of the questions there are about like, say, is it always acceptable for a man to meet his wife? Or do men always make better political leaders than women? So that through those set of surveys and specific questions from those surveys, we can capture to a great extent what the degree of prevalence of patriarchal ideology is in the country. And then by looking at living arrangements of people, information on that, we actually derive from the public use samples of the censuses that have been conducted in these countries, which also allows us to break the information down at a fine region level, you know? So that's how we construct it. Now, just to tell you about some of the interesting things that come out of this, is that if you take a place like Nantung province, the region in South Africa, right? Which is the home of Pretoria, the administrative capital of the country, as well as Johannesburg, which is like the big commercial, you know, the center, right? Now, Nantung ranks pretty high in terms of like the patriarchal, you know, the degree of power of patriarchal when you compare it across other regions of South Africa, which is interesting because normally you would think of the lesser developed part. And if you look within, like, you know, say, if you compare, if you take a place like Ghana, country like Ghana, right? There, the degree of patriarchy will be the least around the great Rakara region, which is a capital region and the more urbanized part, and will be highest in the northern region, right? So which is a more rural underdeveloped part. So you find this interesting kind of contrast between countries, right? And a lot of this has got to do with the weight of the generational dominance versus the female male dominance, right? Now, the thing is that when we think about this generational dominance or the female-female thing, we should not think of them, I would argue, as mere matters of like power within the family. This got a lot to do with the economic policy and especially economic policy regarding retirement, regarding child rearing, regarding child benefits, you know, things like that. Because a lot of times what forces or what makes the families, the prevalence of the joint families or multi-generational families, common in the global south, is the lack of appropriate retirement security that people don't have the ability, for most ordinary people with ordinary incomes, don't have the ability to live by themselves, nor do they have the ability to like, you know, live in like an old age home or a senior community or anything like that. So that in fact makes the, you know, if you don't have health insurance protections like that. So if something happens to, you know, your grandma or your mother or to parents, you're there to take care of them. And it works the other way around too, because if you have to, both your wife and your working, so they have small children at home, then grandma and grandchildren and grandpa living with you also provides that, right? So it's got a lot to do with the economic development and the policies towards employment policy and retirement policies. This is actually very integral to the production of patriarchal structures. So it's not just a question of like, you know, people's culture or, you know, sometimes it's thought about in those terms. It has got a lot to do with culture. I'm not saying that there's no role of culture, but a lot of times it's very much tied to economic policies and welfare policies particularly.