Unequal Unpaid Care Work

Care and domestic work are vital to our economies and societies. It is estimated that unpaid care work adds $10.8 trillion USD to the global economy each year, equivalent to 9% of global GDP. This work is disproportionately carried out by women and girls, and forms a critical barrier for women entrepreneurs who have to juggle it with running a business. Together with CARE International UK, and with funding from Ares Charitable Foundation, we’ve published crucial insights on unpaid care work, its impact on economic and gender justice, and what must be done to build caring economies.  

In late 2022 we surveyed over 700 women entrepreneurs across nearly 80 countries on their experiences, publishing our findings in a report launched in March 2023. Half of these women (49%) told us that their unpaid care workload had increased since the beginning of the pandemic, with 41% now carrying out four or more hours of unpaid care a day. Worryingly, almost one in five (19%) say that this has undermined the performance or limited the growth of their business. 

One of the factors fuelling unequal unpaid care work division is gender stereotypes and social norms. These affect the views and values relating to care work and contribute to the gendered division of care at the household, community, and global level. The most common gender stereotypes that women entrepreneurs surveyed for our 2021 report on the topic had experienced in childhood related to the behaviour or division of domestic labour, particularly that women should be taking care of children or men should be the main providers of the household. Almost half (49%) of respondents also reported that family members or friends have told them to focus more on family or children. 

In order to influence the UK government and global policymakers to fulfil their commitments to women and girls and on women’s economic justice, we worked with CARE International UK, with support from the Ares Charitable Foundation, to explore solutions for overcoming inequalities in unpaid care, and share how building caring economies can foster women’s entrepreneurship and economic justice. 

Published on International Day of Families 2024, our joint paper, “Building caring economies as a pathway to economic and gender justice”, outlines successful interventions to build caring economies in line with the feminist concept of the “5 Rs” of Recognition, Reduction, Redistribution, Representation and Reward for care work. Interventions include increasing care provision; investment in care and social services; focusing on care across the broad spectrum of caring needs – from disability care, to elderly care and childcare; redistributing care work at the household level through social norms change; and driving economic transformation that changes laws, structures and economies, with carers, women in all their diversity, and girls leading the way.