Tuesday last was Census night in New Zealand. Delayed for two years because of the devastating Canterbury earthquake of 22 February 2011, this census is expected to provide an up-to-date and accurate stocktake of New Zealand and its people. The main reason given for this $72 million exercise is to gain better, more recent information in order to inform government policy and the allocation of government funding, as well as assisting in business planning.
The last time I filled in a New Zealand census form was in the late 1990s. I recall struggling over some of the ill-fitting questions then, but - if I’d thought about it all - had expected the questions would be a little more nuanced this time round.
Wrong.
There were three sets of questions that gave me pause: those relating to sex, number of children, and unpaid work. The Statistics NZ (SNZ) spokesperson reminded those of us inclined to ‘over-react’ to poorly framed questions that the census is not designed to get a picture of us as individuals, but rather to create an overall picture of what the mass of individuals looks like. There is an incentive to keep the questions broadly similar in order to make meaningful time comparisons between censuses. But, I wonder, how accurate can that overall picture really be if the instrument designed to depict it is a little on the blunt side?
I first stumbled over the apparently straightforward sex option of male and female. Why were these the only options provided? Even soap operas have heard of intersex and trans people. Apparently, though, some of the leading boffins in the country haven’t. Or, worse, apparently didn’t think this information counts. And, by extension, are there no policy or funding implications for this information, in health for example?
I am aware that SNZ, in other non-census guises, have met with a variety of advocacy groups in this area. Increasingly, in other contested areas of identification, such as ethnicity, SNZ are relying on a method of self-identification. And there is even now a facility for those who do not wish to record M or F on their passports to now use an X (indeterminate / unspecified) designation. So why the insistence on binarism in the census?
SNZ have been advising those spearheading a campaign to tick both M and F options in the census that they will impute ( i.e. guess) their sex from their other answers (number of births, for example), and that the best method for answering the question is to select the sex that relates best to how you live your life now. While this may solve the problem for trans people, where does that leave those who are intersex, those have the sexual characteristics of both sexes?
Unimpressed, I moved on.
Then I came across the question that has hurt and offended many parents of children who were not considered to be ‘live births’. The question asks women for the number of children they have had who were born alive. The only other options are ‘none’ or ‘object to answering this question’. I guess option 3 was some attempt at sensitivity, though interestingly the only other question that offers this option is the one on religion. I also wondered what policy functions were served by this question: everyone has to have an individual census form - including babies just born on the day of the census - and birth, deaths and marriages data would contain a much more accurate picture of stillbirths, infant mortality and live births. Presumably it is this more accurate information that informs health planning and funding. So, I’m genuinely interested to know, why do we have to answer this question? Being paranoid, I almost wonder if it is to catch out the people who put two ticks on the sex question ...
But the highest raised eyebrows of the night - and the questions most pertinent to this blog - were reserved for the questions on paid and unpaid work. For the question on paid work, you were asked to specify the number of hours you worked. You were even asked to include the hours under this question if you engaged in unpaid work for a family business. There was no facility under this question on employment to specify that you had a full-time unpaid caregiving role in the home (whether of a child, disabled family member or elderly family member). Several questions later, however, there was a question on unpaid labour. It asked all respondents to identify whether they engaged in unpaid labour in the form of: household chores, childcare (in your own household), care of the ill or disabled (who are part of your household), childcare (for someone not in the household), or care of the ill or disabled not in your household, or voluntary work in the community. It did not ask for any specification of hours.
I’m sure I’m only not the only peeved and under-valued parent who filled in this question by noting the number of hours I worked unpaid on my form and writing a note to the effect that SNZ would only get a proper appreciation of the labour force, if they sought hours for both paid and unpaid labour. For the 1.7 million people who filled in their census forms online, there is unlikely to have been any facility to register issues with any of the questions.
Other censuses do ask further questions about unpaid work. The 2011 census of England and Wales, for example, asked respondents to specify the hours they worked without pay, giving a hourly range to select from. The catch? The unpaid work specified was for elder care or care of the disabled. In this census, childcare is not only unpaid, but also rendered invisible.
No doubt SNZ would point out that there are not one but two post-censal surveys that capture more detail about the nature of unpaid work. One, the General Social Survey, asks about voluntary work in the community and about care for those not in your own household. It is based on a series of survey questions put to a large random sample of people. The other, the Time Use Survey, includes an activity diary for its participants, so does incorporate whatever unpaid work people are engaged in. The last Time Use Survey revealed the not-at-all surprising fact that women do more of the unpaid labour in the home, and that the women who did the lion’s share of this labour were in their child-bearing years. Funny, that. So what policy is being implemented on the basis of these time-use surveys? This is a lot harder to discern.
In spite of these two surveys, which provide a fuller picture of unpaid work, my issue with the fact that there is a disparity placed on the value of paid and unpaid work in the census is that it sends a clear message about who and what counts. And that is money earned, rather than time spent. This is ground covered, famously, by Marilyn Waring in If Women Counted, later made into a documentary, Who’s Counting? which you can watch here in its entirety. Waring makes the point that if a person is not visible as a producer in a nation’s economy then they will be invisible in terms of receiving any benefit from that economy. For women, this can be seen in loss of retirement savings, risk of poverty in the event of marital breakdown, and a wide range of gender inequities.
Elsewhere, Waring comments that ‘unpaid work relieves expenditure by the State.’ This was demonstrated in a recent New Zealand case where the government was found to be discriminating against the parental caregivers of adult disabled children who were not paid for their care compared with external caregivers who were. The government contested the caregivers’ case saying the care they provided was part of their ‘natural familial duties’ and therefore not eligible for funding. The costs that would be involved in both paying them adequately and changing policy were also included as reasons for not doing so in the Crown case. Fortunately, the Courts accepted that these unpaid workers were not only working but were also being discriminated against on the basis of family status. The government appealed the decision, which went to the Court of Appeal, who again found in the caregivers’ favour. Reluctantly, the government accepted the verdict without further appeal but made it clear that it didn’t think ‘its’ money was best spent in this area.
Given that such a clear case of discrimination for unpaid workers was met with a tough fight by the government - who based part of their case on the false premise that the caregivers weren’t working at all, but rather engaged in a familial duty of care as part of a so-called ‘implied social contract’, it seems unlikely that the unpaid work of love that other parents engage in will be recognised in any form anytime soon.
Perhaps that is why unpaid care work doesn’t count for much. Because to recognise caregiving as work that should be compensated - even if not at so-called market-value - is to recognise a fundamental shift in what societies value: time spent rather than money earned, nurture rather than exploitation, equity rather than competition, families (of all kinds) and communities rather than individuals.
But aren’t those the things that really count?
