The hidden costs of unpaid caregiving

• Author: Sarah Gammage - Naziha Sultana - Manon Mouron
• Position: SARAH GAMMAGE directs the Gender, Economic Empowerment and Livelihoods portfolio at the International Center for Research on Women - NAZIHA SULTANA is a feminist economist in the Gender, Economic Empowerment and Livelihoods portfolio at the center - MANON MOURON is an associate gender adviser at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
• Pages: 21-23

ART: ISTOCK/ENISAKSOY

The

Hidden Costs

of Unpaid

Caregiving

The responsibility for unpaid care work

worldwide fa lls disproportionately on

women and girls, leaving them less ti me

for education, leisure, political par tici-

pation, paid work, and other economic

activities. Much of this work is devoted

to caring for household members and doing domestic

chores. Care work takes up a sign ificant amount of

time in most countries, especi ally where infrastruc-

ture is poor and publicly provided service s are limited

or absent (Samman, Presler-Marshall, and Jones

2016). e burden of care work is particularly acute

in rural set tings and in aging societie s. is burden

can limit women’s engagement in market activities

and lead them to concentrate in low-paid, informal,

or home-based work as a means of bala ncing unpaid

care work and paid employment.

e disproportionate representation of women in

low-paid and informal work contributes to gender

wage gaps that undervalue women’s labor and

inflate the numbers of the working p oor. Securing

a pathway to decent work and addressing unpaid

care work are therefore funda mental to women’s

economic empowerment.

To address these issues, the International Center

for Research on Women has been working with

the European Bank for Reconstruction and

Development (EBRD) to explore how investing in

care service s and reducing care burdens can poten-

tially increas e women’s labor force participation. e

goal of the project is to explore whether and how

the private sector identifies and addre sses care needs

and responsibilities as important factors that limit

their ability to hire, reta in, and promote women.

Part of this work includes forecast ing how women’s

labor force participation would be affected if care

needs were resolved more effectively by the private

and public sec tors.

We know that men’s labor force participation

is higher than women’s in all the countries where

the EBRD works, with an average gap of 21 per-

cent. e average gap in southern and eastern

Mediterranean countries is higher, at 49 percent.

Drawing on recent country-specific st udies that

explore how women’s labor force participation

changes with the price of childcare, we can esti-

mate the impact of investing in t his service (Gong,

Breunig, and King 2010; Kalb 2009; Lokshin

The public and private sectors need to work together to promote gender equality

Sarah Gammage, Naziha Sultana, and Manon Mouron

March 2019 | FINANCE & DEVELOPMENT 21