Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: The Care Economy Care comprises all activities that enhance people's physical and emotional health and well-being thus sustaining human life and the reproduction of the workforce and societies.The care economy represents a fundamental contribution to economic production in creating jobs, directly and indirectly, and in enabling other sectors of the economy to function adequately.The care economy can be conceptualized in its broadest terms to include the health and education sectors whilst also encompassing two specific areas of activity -direct, personal and relational care activities such as childcare and elderly care and indirect care activities such as domestic work.For the purposes of this chapter we are focusing primarily on childcare and social/adult care.Policy issues in relation to education and health sectors are discussed in Chapters 15 and 16, respectively.A key distinction can be made between paid and unpaid care work.Paid care work usually takes place in more formal settings and is performed for pay or profit and comprises a wide range of personal service workers, such as nurses, teachers, doctors and personal care workers, including those employed in nursing homes, and informal workers such as au pairs or cleaners.The majority of care workers in the informal economy work under poor conditions, for low pay and have limited, if any, employment protection e.g.childminders, au pairs, cleaners and others working in households.In contrast, unpaid work can be defined as all non-market, non-remunerated activities including both relational work and direct care of persons, such as children or the elderly, and indirect care, such as cooking, cleaning or fetching water.Without investing time, effort and resources in these essential daily tasks, communities, workplaces and economies would cease to function.Such care and domestic tasks vary in physical effort and time-intensity, which in turn depend on location (often more challenging in developing countries and rural locations), socioeconomic status, age and stage in the life course, marital status and number of children.In addition to underscoring the centrality of care to a functioning economy the pandemic has exposed the gender inequalities in the distribution of care work.Across the world, unpaid care work is disproportionately carried out by women and girls, especially by those from groups who, as well as gender discrimination, experience discrimination based on race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality and caste.Women undertake more than threequarters of unpaid care and make up two-thirds of the paid care workforce.vi The unequal distribution of care work as well as non-substitutability of some forms of care has significant gender implications erecting a critical barrier to gender equality and women's economic and social empowerment.It undermines the health and well-being of predominantly female care workers and limits their economic prosperity by fuelling gender gaps in employment and wages.It also leaves women time-poor, unable to meet their basic needs or to participate in social and political activities.In theory, the care economy can have a positive effect on gender inequality both as an important source of women's employment and in terms of 'releasing' women into the labour force through the public provision of care.But because the paid care work force tends to be highly segregated by gender and characterised by low pay and poor working conditions it only exacerbates the gender pay gap and gender divisions.Further, it does nothing to address the unequal distribution of unpaid care work between women and men.Formally categorised as nonmarket work, unpaid care work is not included or counted in countries National Accounting Systems (e.g.GDP).Time Use Survey data shows that women spend on average three times longer on unpaid work than men.This varies among countries, ranging from 1.5 times longer in North American countries to 6.7 times longer in South Asian countries, and in no country is unpaid work equally shared by women and men.Evidence shows that as countries get richer, the hours people spend on unpaid work fall, particularly in relation to domestic chores, with greater access to improved household technologies, labour-saving devices and resources to pay for domestic help.In contrast, in poorer countries, unpaid care work tends to be linked to subsistence requirements, with the provision of food, shelter, fetching water and caring for family members often much more labour-intensive and time consuming.The importance of measuring and addressing unpaid care work to advance gender equality has been acknowledged in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Number 5 through the adoption of Target 5.4 which states that countries should 'recognise 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'.Globally countries are at varying stages of nationalizing and assessing capacity to produce and use the statistics needed to monitor SDG progress and gender-responsive SDGs prioritization.A key challenge is the lack of disaggregated data by gender but also in terms of intersectionality (that is, understanding inequalities as also intersecting across age, ethnicity, race, disability status, migratory status and sexual orientation).The SDGs are discussed in detail in Chapter 6Unpaid care work is a key factor in determining both whether women enter into and stay in employment and the quality of jobs they perform.The associations of unpaid care as women's work that is done for free, influences the working conditions of all care workers.Gender inequalities in paid work outside the care economy also has implications for gender equality within households as well as for women's and men's ability to provide Websites
Source: ResearchOnline
Authors: Sara Cantillon, Nina Teasdale
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3200004320