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Mexico City faces a significant care burden. Women are disproportionately responsible for unpaid domestic and care work such as cooking, cleaning the house, and taking care of children, elderly or sick family members. On average, women spend average 28.6 hours per week on domestic tasks, compared to men who spend 14.25 hours. This imbalance limits women's opportunities for employment, health care and leisure.
The Mexico City Women's Secretariat and Open Data Charter (ODC) developed the Care Indicators System, based on a similar Buenos Aires initiative. This platform aggregates over 80 indicators on care supply and demand. Developed through data mapping, expert roundtables and interviews, the system provides a comprehensive view of the care economy to guide policy creation.
The Care Indicators System offers several key benefits. It provides detailed data that can help design effective care policies. Additionally, it raises the visibility of care work, highlighting its unequal distribution, and ultimately promotes gender equality.
The initiative broadens its impact by also encouraging other cities to adopt similar models. Building on the Care Indicators System and the initiative from the City of Buenos Aires, ODC developed a practical guide for governments called the 'Open Up Guide for the Care Sector.’ This guide offers datasets and best practices for making care data available and useful. By referencing this framework, other governments can replicate the work carried out in Mexico City and Buenos Aires and strive to respond more effectively to the challenges of care work.
Overall, the initiative promotes shared societal responsibility for care work and aims to integrate effective care work policy into public programs and economic measurements.
Women average 28.6 hours per week on domestic tasks in Mexico City.
According to INEGI’s 2020 Population and Housing Census, there are 41 dependents (people aged 0–14 and 65 and over) for every 100 people of working-age in Mexico City.
In Mexico City, data from the National Survey on the Use of Time (ENUT) 2019 shows that women spend, on average, 14.4 hours more per week than men on unpaid domestic work. These hours could potentially be used for formal employment, health care and leisure.
To address the imbalance in care provision, new solutions are required on two fronts: first, in care policies and services, and second, the working conditions for paid care (ILO, 2022). It is crucial to understand local care dynamics, particularly the availability of services and types of demand that appear in disaggregated data.
In 2022, the Secretary for Women in Mexico City, with the support of Open Data Charter, decided to test and adapt the Care Indicators System from the City of Buenos Aires to their local context. This initiative led to the creation of Mexico City’s Care Indicators System, an online platform that consolidates over 80 indicators on the supply and demand of care, and is categorized by the population receiving care and their providers (state, households, community organizations and the private sector).
As part of the development process, partners mapped the data ecosystem of Mexico City, held roundtables with experts and conducted interviews with researchers specialized in care.
These efforts led to designing a system which aims to analyse how the “four diamonds of care” (family/household, markets, the public sector and the non-profit sector) relate to each other. In this sense, the system acknowledges that any alteration by one actor immediately affects others, such as when demographic changes impact investment decisions about care infrastructure and service provision.
Ultimately, the platform allows users to view indicators and interact with the latest available data and graphs showing trends across different periods and areas. Users can also gain granular data insights. Each indicator includes a fact sheet with its definition, data source and complementary metadata. Indicators are also categorized by the demand or supply of care and the sector providing the care (government, households, community sector, market).
Using this information, which seeks to operate entirely with open data, the partners hope to guide the creation of new public policies that comprehensively address the care economy. The aim is to provide a tool that helps promote better care networks, professionalize caregiving and promote new civic or private initiatives to meet the existing care demand, which is often overlooked.
As a prerequisite to addressing the problem, there is a need to measure the number of people who need care, the number of people receiving care, current care conditions, the market for private and public provision, and the profiles of and working conditions of care givers. However, these factors are difficult to measure at this stage because a holistic vision of a care economy does not exist. Additionally, some activities are still not codified under the umbrella of care.
The Care Indicator System is a proposal to make the care economy visible so that governments can reorient their public policies through a comprehensive approach. This vision includes recognising care work, formalising it economically and providing sufficient information to ensure everyone who needs care receives adequate attention.
Addressing care is a shared responsibility that must be embraced by all of society.
The creation of a Care Indicators System in Buenos Aires and its replication in Mexico City lays the basis for more cities to use data to recognise care work and its unequal distribution between men and women. This platform serves as a guide for those seeking to collect, publish and create indicators capable of measuring the care needs that exist in a society. The design process revealed that the system is not only replicable, but also of interest to governments seeking data and strategies to reorient their public policies across sectors like social care, health, the integration of persons with disabilities and support for women's equality.
As a result of these processes, ODC developed the ‘Open Up Guide for the Care Sector’. This practical tool guides governments how to make open data, standards, good practices and use cases available. While not intended to be exhaustive, these resources provide decision-makers with a model resource for advancing government openness based on their local priorities.
The Guide includes a list of 35 datasets with information corresponding to the population that needs to receive care (elderly people, people with disabilities, children and adolescents), including their location, family composition, income and available care services (public, private and community).
Within this Guide, there are three categories of indicators. First, there are context indicators, which quantify and describe the socio-demographic profile of people who require or will require care, as well as the type of care they demand. Second, there are demand indicators, which identify the population’s care needs disaggregated according to age and geographic range as well as the available types of care (formal and informal). Finally, there are supply indicators that capture existing services in the city, their capacities and types of care they provide. Each indicator has metadata, which includes the indicator, the name, conceptual definition and the possible values that the indicator can take when implemented.
The hope for the future is that whoever implements this Guide will incorporate a comprehensive vision of the role of care into the design of public programmes – whether that be allocating annual budgets to health, education and public spaces or incorporating care economy dimensions into official economic measurements of cities, provinces and countries.
For more details on implementing the ‘Open Up Guide for Care Sector’, send an email to info@opendatacharter.org.