The Long-Reaching Effects of the Disbalanced Care Burden

What is Care?

Care has served as a fundamental pillar of humanity, encompassing the essential physical, social, and emotional support required for individual and collective well-being. Its significance lies in the universal nature of human dependency and vulnerability, given how every individual receives and benefits from care activities throughout their lives. This has been succinctly captured by Joan Tronto and Bernice Fisher (1990), who define care as

“A species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”

Similarly, the care economy refers to the system of paid and unpaid care work that sustains the well-being of individuals and communities. It includes activities that provide physical, emotional, and social support. Care services cater primarily to children, people with disabilities, and the elderly, but their impact extends far beyond these groups. Because of its pervasive nature, society, as a whole, benefits from care activities in both domestic and non-domestic settings, carried out by paid and unpaid carers alike.

Paid care workers operate in both formal sectors — such as education, healthcare, and social services — and informal sectors, where they typically face lower wages, fewer benefits, and limited job security compared to their formal counterparts. Meanwhile, unpaid care providers play a critical role in sustaining households through activities like cooking, cleaning, childcare, eldercare, and managing the mental load of household organization. In short, care is everywhere around us. Despite being essential for the well-being of families and communities, however, informal and unpaid care remains largely invisible and undervalued within formal economic systems, often going unrecognized in national accounting and policy frameworks.

Figure 1. Paid Workers vs Unpaid Providers in Care

Source: Designed by author, definitions from the Asia Foundation

Gendered Gaps in Care

While care work is a universal right and a shared responsibility, women have been disproportionately responsible for it in both the paid and unpaid forms. Globally, women perform two-thirds of paid caregiving activities and over three-quarters of unpaid care activities. In terms of paid forms of care, formal care such as childcare, nursing, and early education are female-dominated fields. Additionally, informal care roles, typically filled by women from marginalized communities, are characterized by poor working conditions, low wages, and limited access to legal protections or social safety nets.

The disparity thickens in the context of unpaid care labor with women in the Asia and the Pacific spending 4.1 times more time in unpaid care work compared to men. In a perfect world, women’s participation in the workforce would be supplemented with men’s participation in household care activities – an equitable tradeoff in responsibilities. However, as it stands, employed women usually take on double shifts, accounting for paid labor at workplaces and unpaid labor at home. This is reflected in how household and care duties for working mothers increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, with working mothers being thrice as responsible as fathers. This division is not just a reflection of current social norms, but also a barrier to women’s social, political, and economic empowerment. Many women face professional progress and their care responsibilities as a dichotomous decision, leading to more women in flexible work arrangements, such as part-time or informal sectors, often below their skill levels and with poorer working conditions. All this ultimately culminates in contributing yet another layer to the glass ceiling, challenging women from taking up leadership roles.

Conjoined with other societal barriers, this can effectively restrict women’s career prospects, limit their access to education and leisure, and curtail their broader economic participation. The condition in Nepal is one example of this where over 40% of women who did not participate in economic work stated care activities, such as household chores and family care, as the primary reason for their inactivity. Moreover, a lack of economic and social recognition for their work perpetuates gender disparities, undervalues their contributions, and denies them opportunities for empowerment and financial independence. This structural inequality reinforces cycles of economic dependence and social exclusion for women, especially those in vulnerable socio-economic groups, and hinders development goals as a whole.

Figure 2. Percentage of Women not Participating in Economic Activities due to Care Responsibilities (by province)

Source: National Census 2021, National Statistics Office

The Costly Burden of Care

Globally, around 16.4 billion hours per day is dedicated to unpaid care work, which, if renumerated on the basis of hourly minimum wage, would add up to USD 11 trillion. A majority of this burden is carried by women and girls, and while men have started contributing more to lessen this, the pace is very slow. With the gap between genders devoting time to care activities declining by just seven minutes per day over two decades, it will take centuries before this gap closes. Ignoring the tremendous costs that come along with this burden is not something countries can take a wait-and-watch approach with. One such major cost of the gendered imbalance, that reflects onto macro-economic trends, is the growing concern about an impending ‘demographic crisis’ whereby countries can’t find enough young people to work and pay taxes due to decreasing fertility rates.

The trend of women having children later in life, often over-emphasized in discussions about declining fertility rates, is perhaps the most visible reflection of this demographic crisis created by a lack of support to the care economy. We live in a world where young people often face constant economic insecurity due to the heightened cost of living. This has led to people increasingly prioritizing progressing in education and career, and opting for dual-income households to hedge the costs of possible unemployment of an earning member. Considering this situation, many young people choose to delay having children, especially given the care burden and increasing economic insecurity that would incur. This is especially true for women as they face family-related career interruptions much more frequently than men do. Many need to reduce working hours or take time off work, which disrupts their career progression and earning potential, exemplified by the phenomena of mothers being likely to receive lower wages than childless women, also known as the motherhood penalty. To minimize such disruptions, parents, especially mothers, would need access to substitute care services. However, these are usually expensive and inaccessible to many. Thus, increased care burden has been linked to declined fertility desires, particularly pronounced during times of financial insecurity.

Governments across the globe have attempted to address this rising problem of declining fertility with various measures, from cash benefits to organizing dating events. However, these measures do not address the central issue that taking on additional care burden is a huge risk, especially for women. People seeking security and not having children are not the problem, but merely a symptom of economic insecurity and lack of support to the care economy. Thus, to combat record-low births, it could be beneficial for countries to consider the perspectives of caregivers and their long-standing need for support at various levels. This would require recognizing, reducing, and redistributing unpaid care work, supplemented by ensuring care professions, including those in informal roles, have good working conditions. However, accommodating these needs requires a system do-over with structural socio-economic changes, including governments to first start seeing the care burden as an economic issue with very real opportunity costs rather than an inherent responsibility.