Women, Work, and Age around the World

Gretchen Donehower, University of California, Berkeley

The National Transfer Accounts (NTA) framework has made great progress illuminating the way societies produce, consume, share and save by age. This paper reports the first results of a cross-national project to add gender and the value of non-market time transfers into the NTA framework. Across a diverse group of countries, we report the empirical reality of who does what kind of work, how much they earn for it, who receives what kind of transfers, and how gender roles shape individuals' economic lives. This expands our view of what an economy is and opens the door to a deeper understanding of gender roles, economic development, investments in human capital and the true costs of population aging.