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Introduction to gender, development and
care
Deepta Chopra & Caroline Sweetman
Published online: 29 Oct 2014.
To cite this article: Deepta Chopra & Caroline Sweetman (2014) Introduction to gender, development and
care, Gender & Development, 22:3, 409-421, DOI: 10.1080/13552074.2014.975486
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Introduction to gender, development and
care
Deepta Chopra and Caroline Sweetman
I wanted to go out and change the world, but I couldn’t find a babysitter
– Anonymous
When men cook, cooking is viewed as an important activity; when women cook, it is just a
household chore.
– Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
This issue of Gender & Development explores care from a gender perspective. Care is a
complex term, meaning both care work, and the emotion which societies throughout
the world associate with this work. The Oxford English Dictionary defines care’s dual
linked meanings as: ‘To feel concern or interest; to attach importance to something; and
to look after and provide for the needs of’ (Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.
oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/care, last checked 19 September 2014).
Care is central to all human life. It involves a wide range of activities that take place
within the home or local community, and contribute to meeting the material and/or
developmental, emotional and spiritual needs of one or more other people with whom
the carer is in a direct personal relationship, often within the family.1 Care includes the
direct care of people, household work that facilitates caring for people (indirect care)
and volunteer community care of people, and paid carers, cleaners, health and
education workers. By its very definition, care is interpersonal, has a widespread,
long-term, positive impact on wellbeing and development, and is critical to address
inequality and vulnerability.
Care is a social good; it not only sustains and reproduces society, but also underpins
all development progress. Yet the vast majority of care work is done free, at home; and
it is widely seen as a female responsibility. This gender division of labour has profound
implications for women and girls – both in terms of their daily lives and options, and
their status in society. As the first quotation above implies, caring is a social obligation
which absorbs time and energies, and limits women from playing other roles in
economic, social and political life. As such, being stereotyped as carers perpetuates
female poverty and gender inequality.
Gender & Development, 2014
Vol. 22, No. 3, 409–421, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13552074.2014.975486
– Oxfam GB 2014
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Introduction to gender, development and care
The second quotation above, from the twentieth-century anthropologist Margaret
Mead, is a very important observation about women’s care activities being denigrated
and undervalued, in a way they are not when men do the same tasks. Care work is
undervalued because women ‘do it naturally’, and women are of lower status in most
societies. The fates of the world’s women, and the care economy, are entwined. On
grounds of human rights, and on grounds of equal, sustainable and genuinely human
development, care should be a priority for all involved in development.
The articles in this issue represent the third phase of a Learning Project on Care,
instigated by Gender & Development in partnership with ActionAid, the Institute of
Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, and Oxfam. The project took place
between November 2013 and the time of writing (September 2014). The aim was to
provide a space for over 70 researchers, policymakers and practitioners working on
gender, development and care to address the question of what development practice
would look like if it took care seriously, from a women’s rights and gender equality
perspective. It was recognised that development practitioners and policymakers need
to work towards changing the world so our economic, social and political systems
value care in both practical and ideological terms. This project was premised on the
notion that care is a good thing, yet its unequal distribution to women needs to be
altered substantially. The goal is for care work to be divided fairly between the sexes,
and between the household and other social institutions, including the state.2
Writers in this issue explore women’s experience of care work in different contexts
from a feminist perspective, highlighting the impact that care work has for their lives,
choices and wellbeing, and for the institutions of family, state and market – all of which
lose out through unsustainable arrangements for care. Authors share innovative ways
in which some governments and development organisations are responding, to ensure
care is shared more equitably. We hope we are seeing the first tentative steps in a
worldwide process of transformation.
Care: an unequal responsibility of women and girls
Care is part of all our lives, every minute of every day, and goes largely unremarked
and unquestioned as a result. We are brought up to give and receive care from our
earliest childhood and in most societies the norm is for women to be primary carers.
This unequal distribution of unpaid care work arises from prevailing gender norms and
values (Birdsall and McGreevey 1983; Budlender 2010). Some people consider care
work to be a natural and normal thing for women to do because of their ‘maternal’ and
‘caring’ instincts, while others think that men would be no good at it. These values are
internalised by women and girls, as well as men and boys, down the generations. A
sense of obligation - and often, love - for dependants makes it impossible for women to
consider any other way to meet their family’s care needs.
410 Gender & Development Vol. 22, No. 3, 2014

While care in itself is a positive thing and the foundation for both society and the
economy, it is distributed unequally within the household, and between the household
and other social institutions, notably the state. Unpaid care work occupies large
amounts of women’s and girls’ time, restricting participation in civil, economic and
social spheres, and also in public life. In a study of six countries in the global South.3
Debbie Budlender (2008) found that in all six countries women did more work (both
paid and unpaid) than men – men did between 74 per cent (South Africa) and 94 per
cent (India) of the workloads of women. In all countries, men did much less unpaid
care work than women, with the gender gap most marked in India, where women
recorded spending nearly ten times as much time on unpaid care work than men.
Gender inequality in time spent on care is a fact for the global North too. According to
the US Census Bureau, women devote more than 110 million hours a year to unpaid
interactive child care, more than double men’s less than 55 million hours (http://
shriverreport.org/unpaid-and-undervalued-care-work-keeps-women-on-the-brink/,
last checked 22 September 2014).
Shahra Razavi (2007) highlights how the unequal burden of unpaid care work on
women corrodes their ability to seek employment and income, thereby increasing the
risk of ‘economic disempowerment’ (22). Compromises that women may often strike
because of their unpaid care work responsibilities include taking up low-paid, part
time and less secure or more hazardous employment (Antonopolous 2009, Kabeer et al.
2011). At times of crisis, when the cost of living increases and livelihoods become more
precarious, the situation becomes more untenable as both the need for unpaid care
work and paid work increases (Chopra et al. 2013). Care work also constrains women’s
ability to participate on equal terms with men in development interventions supported
by international and national non-government organisations (NGOs).
Care is widely believed to be an issue for individual families to figure out, rather
than a social good to be supported by wider communities and society at large. For
families with high ratios of dependants to carers, the responsibility is particularly
heavy. ‘Time poverty’ results, with various negative implications for the household and
for the carers (mostly women) within it. Households are more likely to be poor due to
lack of time to pursue income-generating work. Knock-on effects go down the
generations (Narayanan 2008; Pells 2010; Sudarshan 2011). Older daughters are often
prevented from going to school because of the need to care for younger children.
Elderly women may also need to provide care, with a negative impact on their own
wellbeing. In this way, economic empowerment through paid work becomes indivi-dualised,
limited and unsustainable because of unpaid care work.
Heavy burdens of care commonly result in exhaustion and ill-health for women.
Care is characterised by its relentlessness, and if it is carried out within the home, there
are no official hours of work, leading to a situation where ‘a woman’s work is never
done’.4 Carrying out both direct and indirect care is even harder in the global South in
the face of lack of basic amenities such as piped water to households, and essential
Gender & Development Vol. 22, No. 3, 2014 411

public services including health, education and early childhood support. The drudgery
associated with care is most serious for women living in poverty, who are unable to
lessen the care load by investing in labour-saving technologies, paying for services
from the private sector, or employing household help.
The undervaluing of care work and its links with gender inequality becomes even
more evident when looking at the paid-to-unpaid care ‘chain’ (that is, the range of
different arrangements made for care, ranging from unpaid family care on one end of a
continuum, to paid care at the other end). Households which are comparatively well-off
have the flexibility for women to earn income, and replace their role at home by
paying for care from a domestic worker or, in some contexts, from an institution such
as a day nursery. When domestic workers are employed in private homes, the care
chain can stretch both within and across national boundaries, with migrants employed
in extremely poor conditions. Alternatively, the care chain may be less lengthy and
depend on the labour of poorer relatives from within the same family (Hochs-child
2000).
Domestic work within private homes is typically unregulated and below the radar
of legal systems. According to the International Labour Organization, there were over
52 million domestic workers in the world in 2010, most of whom are women (ILO 2012,
4), who mostly work for little pay and with little legal protection. Even in countries
where care workers are employed in formal businesses and regulated, conditions and
wages still remain poor. Solving the care burden by purchasing services is not a just or
sustainable solution if the ‘jobs’ on offer are exploitative, violating poor women’s rights
to decent work. Women employers of domestic workers are no more likely than wider
society to value the domestic chores they pay other women to do on their behalf. Living
and working in private households, domestic workers are extremely vulnerable to
exploitation, violence and abuse, including sexual abuse from men who see them as
playing the role of proxy wives (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003).
Given the importance of care to our societies and our well-being, why has it taken
so long for care, and the ‘care covenant’ (that is, the institutional arrangements made
for care in different societies) to be subjected to real scrutiny and critique? In the next
section, we explore the reasons for this, before concluding by examining some of the
strategies discussed in our Learning Project and written up by contributors to this
issue.
Explaining the invisibility of care from development agendas
Gender and development as a field of thought and activism bases itself on the
commitment to challenging ideas that the gender division of labour is natural. Feminist
anthropologists, among others, have shown the wide variety of different ways of
organising care work in societies in the global South and North and emphasised also
that these ways of living change over time. Economic and political changes cause, and

are affected by, changes in attitudes to women’s and men’s work and their role within
families.
However, changes in attitudes to care work and who should most appropriately do
it seem to come more slowly than changes in other areas of the gender division of
labour. Stereotypes of men as family providers and women as family carers are
common (though not universal), but while women have increasingly shouldered more
of the work of income-earning, men have not shifted to take on more of the work of
caring, resulting in unequal workloads. In parts of the world, growing patriarchal
religious conservatism serves to further sustain and reproduce gender inequalities and
render care invisible.
Governments and development organisations are products of wider society, and as
such reflect male bias (Elson 1991). Policymakers and practitioners ignore care as an
issue as it is associated with the private sphere of the household and with women, and
is not widely understood as work which represents a key contribution not only to
family wellbeing but to human development. Despite a substantial and credible body
of evidence from feminist economists and others on the extent to which women and
girls perform unpaid care work, and its contribution to the economy (Budlender 2010;
Elson 2000), care continues to be off the policy agenda. Deepta Chopra et al. (2013)
found that care was invisible not only in the intent and implementation of policy, but
also in research including process analysis and monitoring and evaluation, in
programming and in budgeting. As a result, the depletion of human resources goes
unnoticed and unmeasured, and there is lack of attention to the quality of care being
offered in seriously constrained circumstances.
Feminist economists highlight the fact that production depends on reproduction –
that is, economic development depends on care. Unpaid domestic and community
work enables the productive economy to function because it cares for the existing, and
future, workforce. Yet since power shapes what is produced and valued, care work
often disappears from economic analysis; those involved in care, and in other forms of
unpaid work, become invisible (Eyben 2012). Care work is not incorporated into
economic analysis, and statistics and data used by decision-makers in governments and
development organisations do not capture issues including time-use, the costs of care
to women’s employment or girls’ education, or focus on the need to invest in care in
order to sustain the workforce into the future.
An additional factor in the continuing lack of attention to care is that its invisibility
is politically expedient. The assumption that unpaid care work is ‘outside’ the concerns
of the state is convenient, absolving decision-makers of responsibility for the terms and
conditions on which care work is done. They are not implicated if care is performed to
a low standard, if it leads to exhaustion for the carers, or if it is done by exploited and
abused carers who have no employment rights because their work takes place within
private households.

There is evidence that policymakers continue to rely on the current unjust care
covenant. They may tacitly draw on unpaid care as a resource to plug the gaps in
austerity budgets, to enable poor populations to survive, and to absorb the shocks to
household budgets of job losses. Feminist researchers called attention to this in the
1980s in the wake of Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) (Elson 1991), and similar
trends are clear today. They may also call on women to take paid work without
computing the impact of this on carers or those who rely on them. For example, in
2012, Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), called on
Japanese women to enter paid work to rescue Japan’s stagnating economy, drawing on
a 2010 report that calculated raising women’s participation in paid work from 60 per
cent to 80 per cent would result in GDP rising by 15 per cent (Ozawa 2012, no page
number). The issue of how they would continue to do existing unpaid work was not
part of the debate – women’s time spent in unpaid care work is widely assumed to be
infinitely elastic. Feminist researchers and activists continue to lobby mainstream
economists and decision-makers in the international financial institutions, governments
and development organisations including NGOs to convince them of the critical
importance of a feminist analysis of the economy and make care visible.
Strategies for change
For the sake of women’s rights, gender equality, and sustainable development, we need
transformative approaches to care. These should be designed to recognise and reduce
care workloads by all means possible, lessening drudgery and ensuring high-quality
care is possible for all. In short, what is needed is to recast the care covenant between
women and men, the wealthy and the impoverished, and perhaps most importantly,
between households, states, and markets. Participants in the Learning Project advanced
their ideas on strategies that can be adopted to ensure such empowering outcomes for
women and girls.
In her article in this issue, Valeria Esquivel contributes an introduction to feminist
perspectives on care. She provides a useful glossary of the many terms used in
discussions of the issue, and invites development policymakers and practitioners to
visualise what a transformative approach to care would look like. Her article
emphasises that policies and practices focusing on care can be designed and
implemented in transformative ways. This means supporting carers – predominantly
women – and lightening their care burdens, while challenging the notion that this work
is intrinsically ‘female’, and of lesser importance than work seen as ‘productive’. The
article invites development practitioners to reflect on their own views about care, and
the role they can play in recognising, reducing and redistributing care.

Using human rights arguments to re-frame the issue of care
Policymakers need to be fully aware of the full extent, and significance, of all care work
to humanity, whether unpaid or paid.5 They should also be familiar with the economic
and human rights arguments that states should support the care economy (including
both unpaid and paid care work). Placing care squarely and permanently on the
agenda of policymakers requires fundamental change to the ways development is seen
and the economy is understood. It is about focusing on equality, human rights and the
need for an economic system that focuses on the quality of care work and the long-term
wellbeing of current and future generations. The scale of the changes needed, and their
profoundly political nature, make it extremely difficult to challenge the injustice of the
current care covenant between women and men, and between elites and people living
in poverty.
A very important step forward in this work is to draw attention to the human rights
concerns linked to care. A potential way forward is advocating for care reform on
grounds of human rights. In 2013, Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona, then the UN
Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty, highlighted continuing responsibility for
unpaid care as a violation of women’s human rights and called for states to take action
on it (UN 2013). In this issue, Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona and Kate Donald analyse
the relevance of international human rights law to policymakers and practitioners who
want to respond to the care burdens of women living in poverty. They offer
recommendations for policy and practice - both for national and local governments,
and for development practitioners - based on human rights law and standards. Linking
care to women’s human rights at a conceptual and policy level is an important step
forward in convincing governments to take action, and something that practitioners
and activists working on this issue are finding very useful.
Women’s rights activists have a key part to play in emphasising the need to
understand the interconnections between women’s economic, social and political rights.
Caring responsibilities compromise women’s ability to access education and decent
work, which in turn compromises their power in marriage and the household.
Powerful ideologies of feminine duty shape women’s perceptions of the choices open
to them in their lives, and care responsibilities tie them to the household and family.
Emphasising the synergies between women carers’ rights, and the rights of care
recipients
Upholding and realising human rights also provides a primary motivation for the work
that NGOs undertake at all levels of society. In community development, organisations
working from a rights perspective can integrate a concern for women’s rights and
specifically the rights of carers into work with other marginalised groups. In the
process of doing this, a synergy can be demonstrated between the rights of women
carers and the recipients of their care.

In her article in this issue, Sylvie Cordier shares experience from ADD International
of working in Cambodian communities where the burden of care for a disabled relative
traditionally falls on women. In Cambodia, Khmer culture is strongly structured
around the family unit within which both the role of women and discrimination
towards people with learning disabilities are sanctioned by social hierarchy, percep-tions
of weakness, and the concept of karmic merit. ADD pursued a strategy of action
learning which raised awareness of the issues facing people living with intellectual
disabilities in poor communities, the concerns and rights of their carers, and the need to
develop programmes which reduce the care burden by supporting people living with
intellectual disabilities to become more self-reliant – both in terms of personal social
care, and as contributors to the family income.
Integrating care into anti-poverty policies and programming
Sustainable development programming needs to be planned on the understanding that
both productive and reproductive activities are essential to livelihoods. It also requires
a focus on individuals in the context of their wider families and households. Activities
need to support both women and men to do both, rather than focusing on narrow goals
of increasing household income while blind to the wider implications for women’s
rights and the wellbeing of all in the household.
However, many development organisations working at community level still
continue to focus on production. Despite critiques of this from feminists in develop-ment,
there is often little or no attention to the problems this ‘feminisation of
responsibility and obligation’ causes (Chant 2006, 206). As suggested earlier, this can
result in significant disadvantage for women and girls: exhaustion, stress when
businesses fail and credit loans cannot be paid back, older daughters losing out on
education, and very elderly women being pressed into service to care for grandchil-dren.
Equally importantly, all of us want to be able to look after our families as well as
possible, and this is critical for sustainable and decent development. Therefore
compromises to the quality of care resulting from development interventions should
be cause for concern for planners and practitioners.
The first step in challenging this is to ensure that tools and planning frameworks are
available that enable communities to capture the realities of women’s and men’s lives.
In their article in this issue, Thalia Kidder, Zahria Mapandi, and Hector Ortega share
their experiences of developing two methods for action research that aim to do this, to
challenge assumptions about care and its relationship to production, and to provide
information and statistics to inform the planning of community development
initiatives, as well as to lobby the state to provide technology and infrastructure
to lessen the burden of care. Oxfam and local partners in the Philippines, Honduras
and Bangladesh have piloted the two approaches. Women’s heavy and unequal

responsibilities for care, long considered ordinary or insignificant by development
workers as well as the wider public. They are being reframed as issues of social justice
through new methodologies for communities to analyse care work and advocate for
change.
Assessing the impact of new ways of working with communities is critical to ensure
new approaches are as influential as possible. In her article in this issue, Felicity Butler
discusses the role that Fair Trade initiatives can have in changing attitudes about the
value of women’s unpaid care work, and piloting a model of working in which women
receive remuneration for this work. She draws on a research study of an innovative
Community Fair Trade initiative which has a pricing model that recognises the unpaid
work of women, since women’s unpaid work represents an important input into
production and should be valued and remunerated. This initiative is a joint project
between The Body Shop International (BSI) and its partner, Cooperativa Juan Francisco
Paz Silva (CJFPS), a sesame-producing co-operative in Nicaragua. It appears that
recognition of the unpaid work of women in the price coupled with other enabling
factors can have a positive impact on women and gender relations in their households.
This has implications for governments, companies, and development policymakers and
practitioners.
Challenging attitudes and beliefs through working with men
Community-level development programming is challenging attitudes and beliefs about
care by recasting ideas of male roles and masculinity. In their article, Kate Doyle, Jane
Kato-Wallace, Shamsi Kazimbaya and Gary Barker discuss Promundo and RWAM-REC’s
programmatic experiences in Rwanda of implementing MenCare+, a gender
transformative approach to engaging young and adult men (ages 15-35) in caregiving,
maternal, new-born and child health, and sexual and reproductive health and rights.
They have researched the impact of the programme on more than 600 fathers, and the
results are presented here. They confirm how important it is for development
practitioners to engage fathers to think beyond men’s token participation in care
work, and show how the participation of fathers in early childhood can be used to
transform gender dynamics within the home. The article provides practical lessons
learnt to guide other organisations interested in working with men to transform norms
around fatherhood and care work.
Addressing care from a transformative perspective
In social policy, where care is clearly at the heart of the agenda, there are huge
opportunities to address care from a radical and transformative perspective. However,
this is not always an explicit aim of policies, and some actually reinforce gender
stereotypes which need to be challenged.

In their article, Marzia Fontana and Diane Elson focus on two areas of public policy
which have a direct relevance to women, since they clearly potentially reduce the care
burden currently carried within households. Governments need to provide public
finance to support services to reduce and redistribute unpaid work. Marzia Fontana
and Diane Elson take the examples of water provision in Tanzania and early education
and child-care in Mexico and Chile to show the impact of strategies which reduce
the household care burden on wider development. These case studies demonstrate
the need to focus on the medium- to long-term benefits of investing in care.
While the financial costs of the required public investment are up front and highly
visible, the (many) benefits are diffuse, spread over time, and include non-monetary as
well as monetary benefits. They argue:
Targeted interventions in specific communities can be an effective way to change public
perceptions of the nature, extent and worth of unpaid work, and promote more equal sharing of
this work between women and men. But national level polices are also required. Governments
need to provide public finance to support services to reduce and redistribute unpaid work.
(Fontana and Elson 2014, 455–470)
Caution does need to be exercised when it comes to policies focusing on women as
carers in order to achieve wider goals. An example is social protection policies giving
women payments on condition their children attend school. These cash payments,
which rely on women’s pivotal role in the family as mothers and wives, may be hugely
welcome. However, this mode of delivery risks slowing down the pace of change in
gender roles (Molyneux 2006). In contrast, strengthening care provision in ways that
empower women leads to better development outcomes for both carers and their
charges (Razavi 2007; Eyben and Fontana 2011). Pursuing transformative policies to
ensure a synergy between sustainable development, rights for carers, and rights for
those receiving care, is clearly the way forward.
Exploiting opportunities to make care visible
Changing historical contexts and big shifts such as demographic changes and the
current food and financial crises provide an opportunity to make care more visible.
These changes often put additional and unbearable strains on community and family
relations. For example, changing demographic trends such as an increasing ageing
population, or the HIV pandemic, have started highlighting the need for care, which
may then become a critical policy issue. The same demographic changes have also
increased the demand for paid care workers, whose increasing visibility results in care
being more visible, and in increasing mobilisation of paid care workers (Eyben 2012).
Changes and crises offer an opportunity to lobby states and international
organisations to transform the care covenant. In their article in this issue, Deepta
Chopra, Patience Ekeoba, Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed, Rachel Moussié and Mona Sherpa

compare approaches, strategies and lessons learnt in advocacy work Nepal and
Nigeria. These initiatives aimed to challenge attitudes and beliefs of senior policy-makers,
raising awareness of women’s unequal responsibility for providing care for
young children, challenging ideas that this is natural and positive, and influencing
policymakers to understand the importance of providing services to support them. The
article distinguishes between what the authors call ‘critical engagement’ (in the case of
Nepal), where government policies were critiqued from ‘outside’, as compared to
‘constructive engagement’ (in the case of Nigeria), where a close partnership with
‘insiders’ in government opened up the possibility of different strategies. The article
ends with some reflections on the challenges facing the teams during this work, and the
implications and lessons that can be drawn from these two case studies.
Conclusion
Care is critical to social wellbeing, and forms a critical foundation for the functioning of
markets and the economy. However, it is invisible, unequally distributed with women
and girls taking on the bulk of care giving and receives inadequate investment. We also
know that the ways societies organise care is based on long-standing patterns of gender
norms, institutional arrangements and power relations, and that power plays a critical
role in keeping care invisible.
The existing ‘careless’ economy is untenable and unsustainable, but considerable
challenges in getting care into development policies and practice remain. Participants in
the G&D Learning Project reiterated the importance of the state, and development
organisations including NGOs, as vital players in amongst the various institutional
structures that form the ‘care diamond’ in the provision of care (Razavi 2007).
Currently, conventional models of development which stress the importance of
economic growth are under scrutiny for their failure to understand the harmful social
and economic effects of inequality, which is growing in many contexts in the global
South as well as North.
Significant shifts in beliefs about what development is, and how it serves or exploits
different groups in society, present an opportunity in which care and its significance to
humanity can be made more visible. Successive, small wins are equally important, and
strategies such as naming care as vital, framing care as being integral to human
wellbeing and fulfilment of human rights, calling for government action and change in
policy, and programming to support more equitable distribution of care responsibilities
will be very effective in this process (Eyben 2012). It is hoped that the articles outlined
in this issue provide concrete examples of a way forward for recognising women and
girls’ contributions to the economy, reducing the drudgery associated with it, and
redistributing it (to men, local communities, and the state) as a basis for true gender
equality.

Deepta Chopra is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies. Postal address: Library Road,
Falmer BN1 9RE, UK. Email: d.chopra@ids.ac.uk
Caroline Sweetman is Editor of Gender and Development.
Notes
1 This relationship is most often between family members, within a domestic setting, but
this can sometimes be outsourced to paid care workers. If we envisage a spectrum of
modes of delivery of care where, on one end, there are no paid carers involved, while at
the other end care can be delivered in an institutional setting such as an old people’s
home by paid carers. Along the entire spectrum, the nature of the tasks associated with
care requires direct one-to-one interaction.
2 The Learning Project involved an online electronic discussion, a face-to-face learning
event, and finally a phase in which the articles which appear here were developed for
publication.
3 The six countries in the study were Argentina, Nicaragua, India, the Republic of Korea,
South Africa and Tanzania.
4 ‘A woman’s work is never done’ is a traditional English proverb.
5 Part of the problem is that it is hard to capture the scope and volume of care work and
unpaid work – there is no clear consensus on the definition of these or other categories,
or on the precise data collected and labelled as productive or not in different countries
(Budlender 2012).
References
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the authors 22 September 2014)
Birdsall, Nancy and William Paul McGreevey (1983) ‘Women, poverty, and development’,
in Mayra Buvinic, Margaret A. Lycette and William Paul McGreevy (eds.) Women and
Poverty in the Third World, Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 3–13
Budlender, Debbie (2010) ‘What do Time Use Studies tell us about Unpaid Care Work?’, in
Debbie Budlender (ed.) Time Use Studies and Unpaid Care Work, New York and London:
Routledge, pp. 1–45
Budlender, Debbie (2008) The Statistical Evidence on Care and Non-Care Work Across Six
Countries, Geneva: UNRISD
Chant, Sylvia (2006) ‘Re-thinking the “feminization of poverty” in relation to aggregate
gender indices’, Journal of Human Development 7(2): 201–220
Chopra, Deepta, Alexandra Wanjiku Kelbert and Padmini Iyer (2013) A Feminist Political
Economy Analysis of Public Policies Related to Care: A Thematic Review, Brighton: IDS

Elson Diane (2000) Progress of the World’s Women 2000: UNIFEM Biennial Report, New York:
United Nations Development Fund for Women
Elson, Diane (1991) ‘Male bias in macroeconomics: The case of structural adjustment’, in
Diane Elson (ed.) Male Bias in the Development Process, Manchester: Manchester University
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Development Agenda, IDS Working Paper 411, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies
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The Bellagio Initiative, Brighton, London and New York: Institute of Development
Studies, The Resource Alliance and Rockefeller Foundation
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie Russell Hochschild (2003) Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and
Sex Workers in the New Economy, London, Granta
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1 October 2014)
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375, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies
Molyneux, Maxine (2006) ‘Mothers at the Service of the New Poverty Agenda: Progresa/
Oportunidades, Mexico’s Conditional Transfer Programme’, Social Policy & Administration
40(4): 425–49
Narayanan, Sudha (2008) ‘Employment Guarantee, Women’s Work and Childcare’,
Economic and Political Weekly, 1 March
Ozawa, Harumi (2012) ‘Woman is Japan’s secret economic weapon’, Agence France Press,
23 November
Pells, Kirrily (2010) Inequalities, Life Chances and Gender: Young Lives Round 3 Preliminary
Findings, Oxford: Department of International Development, University of Oxford,
http://www.younglives.org.uk/files/policy-papers/inequalities-life-chances-and-gender (last
checked by the authors 22 September 2014)
Razavi, Shahra (2007) The Political and Social Economy of Care in a Development Context:
Conceptual Issues, Research Questions and Policy Options, Geneva: UNRISD
Sudarshan, Ratna (2011) India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act: Women’s
Participation and Impacts in Himachal Pradesh, Kerala and Rajasthan, CSP Research Report
06, January, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies Centre for Social Protection
United Nations (UN) (2013) Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and
Human Rights, A/68/293 New York: United Nations

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