Chapter 1: Women's Economic Empowerment, Unpaid Work, and Care Economy in Mexico

The objective was to establish whether unpaid work limits women's economic empowerment, and if women with lower income and education levels are limited by greater unpaid work. The database used was the National Household Income and Expenditure Survey (ENIGH) 2022, applying a Probit econometric model, focusing on variables such as (a) being female, (b) age of the head of household, (c) type of household, (d) presence of minors, (e) type of activity, (f) number of income earners in the household, (g) time spent on housework, (h) having a basic education, (i) type of company, (j) socioeconomic stratum of the household, (k) hours worked per week, and (l) having a secondary or higher education. The main findings were to partially verify that women perform more hours of unpaid work, circumscribing their economic empowerment and restricting their availability to be employed for paid work. This confirms that women with lower income levels experience by performing more unpaid work, as is the case with women with lower education levels, as opposed to those with higher education levels.