Unpaid care work and its implications for women empowerment

1. PRESENTED BY
Dr. Laxmi Narayan
Assistant Professor of Economics
Govt. P.G. College Mahendergarh)
Unpaid Care Work and Women Empowerment

2. What is care?
 Taking care of others is what sustains our societies. ‘Care’
includes direct care of people, housework that facilitates
caring for people (indirect care) and volunteer community
care of people, and paid carers, cleaners, health and
education workers.
 Care has a widespread, long-term, positive impact on
wellbeing and development.
 Care is a social good, it strengthens all development
progress. Markets depend on care for their functioning.
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3. What is Unpaid Care Work?
 Unpaid because person doing the activity does not
receive a wage for it.
 The term ‘care’ stresses that activity provides what is
necessary for the health, well-being, maintenance,
and protection of others.
 The word “work” indicates that the activity involves
mental or physical effort and are costly in time and
energy and are mostly undertaken as obligations
(contractual or social).
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4. What’s the problem?
When care work is so central to human development
and progress, then
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM
Care work is a problem BECAUSE!!!!!!!
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5. It is INVISIBLE:
(In Policy, Research, Programming and Budgeting)
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6. It is UNEQUAL:
A large part of unpaid care work is disproportionately
carried out by females.
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7. 7
Gender Differences in Paid and Unpaid Work
5.9 hours
per day
0.6 hours
per day
Male-female ratio of unpaid care work is 0.102 in case of India

8. Overall also, time use survey found that women
accounts for 52 percent of total hours worked where
as men accounts for 48 percent.
 When work is paid – men perform 64.4 percent of
the work whereas women could get only 35.6
percent of it.
But
 When work is unpaid, the situation completely
reverse – men perform only 26.8 percent of it
whereas women perform 73.1 percent of it.
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Gender Differences in Paid and Unpaid Work

9. It is a Problem
Because its CONSEQUENCES are detrimental to
women health and well being
and
Violets basic human rights of women and girls
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10. Causes and Consequences of Unpaid Care Work

11. Implications of Unpaid care work
for Women Empowerment
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1. Unpaid care work is one of the important areas where
progress would substantially reduce gender inequalities.
2. Unpaid care work is both cause and effect of gender
inequalities.
3. It results into time poverty, poor health and well-being,
limited mobility and perpetuation of women’s unequal
status.
4. It undermines the rights of carers, limiting their
opportunities, capabilities and choices and often
restricting them to low-skilled, irregular or informal
employment.

12. What is the solution?
How to reduce burden and value unpaid care work
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The 3Rs Approach (UN, 2009)
 Recognize: Recognise care work; Measure the value of
unpaid work.
 Reduce: Reduce inefficient and difficult tasks; reduce
the overall time spent by both men and women on
unpaid work
 Redistribute: Redistribute the share of unpaid work
from women to men and also from family to state.

13. RECOGNISE
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What is not seen is not invested in or prioritized
 Measure time use – time budget survey
 Value unpaid care work – opportunity
cost/replacement cost
 Raise awareness and build capacity – officials, staffs
and general public
 gender-responsive budget initiatives – Integrating
gender issues in budgeting.

14. REDUCE
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Investments in infrastructure and labour-saving technologies
that are focused on household level care tasks could be effective in
reducing the time women and girls spend on unpaid care work.
 Improve task productivity – reduce strenuousness and
inefficiency of tasks
 Expand access to key infrastructure - improvements to rural
water and irrigation systems, domestic energy, and rural
transportation infrastructure investments.
 Maintain/expand core public services: Expand, or during
crisis, avoid, cutbacks to essential government services and
infrastructure investments

15. REDISTRIBUTE
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Support equitable burden-sharing, not only within
households (between women and men), but also
between and among key providers such as governments,
the private sector and communities.
 Implement policies favourable to burden-sharing
 Expand access to health care
 Engage with men
 Promote the elimination of gender wage gaps

16. Conclusions
 While much is known about the issue, getting care onto policy
agendas has been a challenge because it is marginalized in
mainstream economic thinking, and because the women’s
movement has failed to mobilize around this agenda.
 Moving forward requires commitments from States as well as
active social movements to ensure that resources are put behind
the policies and investments that contribute to care.
 UN 2030 agenda SDG5- Sub Target 5.4: Recognize and value
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.
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