Unpaid care work: the cornerstone of inequality
Unpaid care is a universal issue: it affects women across the globe, regardless of their levels of education and income or the level of development of their countries. While some countries have made strides to recognise, reduce and redistribute unpaid care work, the largest share of the burden continues to fall on women.
The amount of time devoted to unpaid care work is negatively correlated with female labour force participation. In countries where women spend an average of five hours on unpaid care activities, 50% of women in the working age-population are active, i.e. employed or looking for a job. However, in countries where women spend three hours on unpaid care work, 60% of women are active in the labour force.
Unpaid care work refers to all unpaid services provided within a household for its members, including care of persons, housework and voluntary community work. These activities are considered work, because theoretically one could pay a third person to perform them
It is not only a necessity - it is mainly a mentality
In the societies where households cannot afford to pay for the care needed within the family, the burden falls on women, leaving them unpaid, dependent and vulnerable.
But even in the environments where households can afford another allocation of the care duties in the family (care for children, homeschooling, cleaning, cooking etc), women are judged more by how they perform their care duties, rather than any professional achievement.
Women around the globe are expected -and taught to feel guilty if not- to run perfect households, which is a full -time unpaid job, while in most cases and they also hold a full time underpaid job.
Negative Covid-19 impact on unpaid care work
Re-traditionalization of care
• In USA, UK and Germany during the lockdown, women spend significantly more time caring for children (Adams-Prassl et al. 2020).
• Homeschooling – a new domestic task for many families. Mother’s responsibility – create educational content for children (Carlson et al. 2020).
• Working mothers spend less time on paid work but more on household work. Even when working mothers earn more, they do more childcare than working fathers (Andrew et al. 2020)
Positive Covid-19 impact on unpaid care work
More egalitarian care arrangements
• In USA, share of families with equal sharing of unpaid work increased – due to fathers spending more time on domestic work (Carlson et al. 2020).
• In Spain, men increased their participation in household tasks e.g. grocery shopping (González and Farré 2020).
• In UK, gender childcare gap narrowed from 30.5 to 27.2% – due to men’s availability to participate in childcare (Sevilla & Smith 2020).
• Fathers doubled their time on childcare when they lost their job in UK (Andrew et al. 2020).
• In Germany, fathers with higher earnings working from home provide more care support (Möhring et al. 2020).
A decrease in women’s unpaid care work is related to a ten percentage point increase in women’s labour force participation rate (for a given level of GDP per capita, fertility rate, female unemployment rate, female education, urbanisation rate and maternity leave).
Data from 64 countries representing two thirds of the world’s working age population show that 16.4 billion hours per day are spent in unpaid care work – the equivalent to 2 billion people working eight hours per day with no remuneration. Were such services to be valued on the basis of an hourly minimum wage, they would amount to 9 per cent of global GDP or US$11 trillion (purchasing power parity in 2011).
According to International Labour Organization’s (ILO) report, worldwide 2.1 billion people were in need of care in 2015, including 1.9 billion children under 15 and 200 million older persons. By 2030, this number is expected to reach 2.3 billion, driven by an additional 200 million older persons and children.
“The global prominence of nuclear families and single-headed households, and the growth of women’s employment in certain countries increase the demand for care workers. If not addressed properly, current deficits in care work and its quality will create a severe and unsustainable global care crisis and further increase gender inequalities in the world of work,” said Laura Addati, lead author of the report.
McKinsey Global Institute’s (MGI) Power of Parity research found that the share of women in unpaid-care work has a high and negative correlation with female labor-force participation rates and a moderately negative correlation with women’s chances of participating in professional and technical jobs or of assuming leadership positions. Other research has found similar trends. As COVID-19 has disproportionately increased the time women spend on family responsibilities—by an estimated 30 percent in India, according to one survey, and by 1.5 to 2.0 hours in the United States—it is not surprising that women have dropped out of the workforce at a higher rate than explained by labor-market dynamics alone.
Interventions to address unpaid child care:
The importance of reducing the gender imbalance in responsibility for care cannot be overstated. Interventions to tackle this problem include better recognition of unpaid work, reducing the amount of unpaid work, and rebalancing it between men and women. MGI has determined that the value of unpaid-care work done by women is $10 trillion, or 13 percent of global GDP. Potential interventions could include these:
- Employer- or state-funded provision of childcare or tax policies that encourage both spouses to work
- Family-friendly policies, including flexible programs and part-time programs, to support workers experiencing an increased childcare burden during the pandemic and beyond
- Rethinking performance reviews and promotions, as well as senior- and middle-management buy-in to ensure the widescale adoption of changes
- A professionalized childcare industry, with public-financing support, in developing countries, where the social-services infrastructure is less well developed; this could not just enable many women to work but also create employment for many others
- Access to basic infrastructure, which in the long run can reduce the time women spend on unpaid work; for example, in lower-income countries, a significant portion of the time women devote to such work includes tasks like fetching water and firewood
- Crucial measures to change social norms about who bears childcare responsibilities
Sources:
– Unpaid Care Work: The missing link in the analysis of gender gaps in labour outcomes, OECD Development Centre
– UNPAID CARE WORK IN TIMES OF THE COVID-19 CRISIS Dr Esuna Dugarova
Gender Specialist, UNDP
– International Labor Organisation: ILOSTAT Statistics on unpaid care work
– Gates Foundation: Covid 19 Impact on Women
– McKinsey and Company: Covid 19 and Gender Equality: countering the regressive effects
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