This website portrays what I learned in the Automated Data Visualisation for Policymaking (PP434) course at LSE, during winter term 2024-25.
Here you will find two pieces of work. First, a Portfolio (Section 1) with different tasks that demonstrate the tools I acquire class by class. The learned skills include building a web site, embedding a live visualisation, hosting data in the cloud (GitHub), editing and cleaning data, using API-driven charts, applying loops, APIs, and scrapers, and adding interactivity to my charts, among others.
Then, I show a data science Project (Section 2) that gathers the mentioned learnings and applies them to a social policy issue (in my case, the balance between productive (paid) and reproductive (unpaid) labour for Chile, my country of origin, and the UK, where I took this course).
The folowing website contains practical examples of what I learned in PP434. Open it to check ten applied exercises.
Women and men do not participate in the world in the same way, either economically or personally. This situation is troublesome in many aspects. Unbalanced powers result from underlying gendered institutions, such as societal norms, or job and care policies. The economic markets are not benefiting from a diverse and more extensive working population, undermining productivity. Many women do not benefit from employment-related income, entitlements, or self-satisfaction. But even when we see the female labour force rising, the well-known double shift (where care work has not decreased proportionally nor has been divided equally) is a present burden for women's and society's wellbeing.
This project examines the gendered panorama of productive (paid) and reproductive (unpaid/care) labour. I avoid using the better know term Work-family Balance, as it ignores that family-related tasks are also work. I state that caring responsibilities, mostly on women's shoulders, are biding the extent to which they can participate freely in economic markets. The extra unpaid work women perform is strengthened by the arrival of a first child, and as men do not compensate fully for such caring tasks, having a family becomes a cornerstone in the evergoing dispute between a woman's work and their personal life.
I focus on the cases of Chile and the United Kingdom, two converging economies regarding female labour but with very different foundational institutions concerning care and gender norms.
Globally, around 47% of women are employed or looking for employment, while the figure for men rises to 72% (ILO, 2022). The 25 percentage point difference extends to over 50 pp in some regions. Being outside the labour force makes women vulnerable to economic dependence (related to intrahousehold violence), lack of social security, less scope for self-satisfaction, and poor prospects for the elder years. When considering that men participate more than women, power relationships become unbalanced, leading to a disequilibrium in political, personal and economic fields.
While the UK's gap stands at 9.1 pp, Chile's rises to 21.3, with women working less in Chile than in the UK and men working more.
The employment gap shown above (Figure 1) stands even when women's participation has risen over the years. And despite the fact that the UK's and Chile's situation is converging, as shown below, their distance in previous decades might hide more underlying factors than it seems. Not long ago, in the 1990s, Chile had a female participation of no more than 31% (ILO, 2024). Those institutions hold in other dimensions of women's lives.
The UN acknowledges the need for balance in the domestic field, as the Sustainable Development Goal Target 5.4 recognizes and values unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate.
While the amount of women working in the paid market has increased (Figure 2), a significant part of their complementary time is devoted to unpaid domestic and care work (Figure 3). Reproductive labour still falls upon Chilean women, as they are spending up to 2.24 times what men spend on domestic and care work. The figure is lower for the UK (1.82 times), as well as for absolute terms; while Chilean women spend 22% of their day caring for their houses and families, UK women spend 12.7%. What is more striking is the increasing trend in the Chilean case; given that more women work in the paid market every year, balanced societies would have, as a consequence, greater parity. Nevertheless, women entering the productive world do not translate into them sharing the reproductive one.
Even when women in Chile and the UK sustain increasing rates of paid employment (pushing the double shift to burdensome levels), many women are restricted from participating in productive labour because of their care responsibilities. As Figure 4 shows, 33.8% of Chilean women do not participate due to these reasons. That the UK's figure is much lower (12%) sheds light on the different institutions (formal and informal) that prevail in both settings.
Figure 5 shows the relationship between country levels of labour force participation and unpaid care work time. No evident trend describes the situation either for women or men, and the observed variation for the same levels of female employment, for instance, implies that multiple factors shape the underlying structures and dynamics behind productive and reproductive balance. Both sides of the equation are not as substitutes as one might think, and different labour conditions for women (such as informality or half-time schedules) moderate the resulting scenario. Additionally, as stated before, societal norms intrinsic to each country have a relevant role.
Societal norms (such as gender ones) can affect the outcome of productive and reproductive labour balance. Indeed, the World Values Survey asked people from both the UK and Chile if they agreed with the following statement: When a mother works for pay, the children suffer. This statement puts a social constraint on women working in the productive sphere. While 27.5% of UK respondents strongly disagree with such an idea, only 14.8% of Chileans did. On the other hand, 13.7% of Chileans strongly agreed with it, compared to barely 3.8% in the UK. These strong-rooted perceptions of gender roles shape personal decisions beyond merely labour policies' parameters.
Is reproductive labour constraining productive work? A relevant study in this field is the Child Penalty Atlas. Researchers estimated the penalty women and men suffer labour-wise when becoming parents. While men maintain participation levels after becoming parents, women reduce their labour by 35% in Chile and 27% in the UK. As expected, the UK experiences a smaller penalty than Chile. Nevertheless, the UK's penalty is quite substantial and (like the Chilean one) does not go away for over 10 years.
Everywhere in the world, women are experiencing a labour penalty due to reproductive matters. Many times, when this penalty is lower, it hides other non-convenient factors, such as survival minimum levels of participation or a Marriage Penalty (also researched by the same authors).
Child penalty is a relevant and growing topic of discussion, as it puts a ceiling on the potential increase and levelling of productive labour between men and women. Figure 9 analyses the relationship between such a penalty and the gender gap mentioned in Figure 1, finding a positive association; the larger the gap, the larger the penalty. The figure highlights two other features. The first one is that there are regional clusters (each with its own positive link). While Asian countries spread across different levels of both penalties and gaps, European ones concentrate on lower gaps and middle-level penalties. The Americas present the same levels of penalties but with more significant gaps. And African countries have spread gaps and relatively lower penalties.
The second feature relates to the UK and Chile sharing similar penalties with such different gaps, which is consistent with what this project stated at the beginning: the UK and Chile might share comparable features sometimes, but the underlying norms prevail and will be hard to eradicate.