Colombian women work on average an hour and a half more per day than Colombian men according to a report by the national statistics agency DANE.
The report showed that the average number of hours a day worked by women is 10.3 compared to the daily average of men which is 8.8.
The study also found that women in urban and rural areas of the country do more unpaid work than men. It was revealed that between 2007 and 2010, women in urban areas spent 43% of their working time involved in non-remunerated activities while men in urban areas spent only 21% of their working time doing unpaid work.
In rural areas, both genders do more unpaid work than their city-dwelling counterparts. Of work done by women in the countryside, 51% is unpaid compared to 23% of the work done by men.
William Rodriguez of the NGO Corporacion Accion Mujer based in Bogota, told Colombia Reports “women in the field of work, as much as in other fields, are in situations of exploitation.”
Rodriguez went on to say that he did not think that the statistics were correct in terms of the difference in the number of hours worked by women and men. He said that in rural areas “a man can wake up at five or six in the morning but the woman wakes up at one or two in the morning to work and it is she who prepares the food for the man and who does the chores in the house, so women are more exploited.”