Unpaid care and domestic work refer to unpaid work carried out in households. Tasks such as cooking, cleaning, childcare, transport, laundry. These are the everyday tasks that aren’t valued monetarily or distributed evenly but should be.

‘Across the world women shoulder a disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work, causing one of the biggest gender gaps between men and women.'

‘Globally, girls ages between five and 14 years old spend 40% more time, or 160 million more hours per day on unpaid household chores, collecting water and firewood compared to boys.’

‘606 million women of working age perform unpaid care and domestic work on a full-time basis, compared with just 41 million men’

Domestic work and care usually fall on the shoulders of women and girls and often goes unrecognised, unvalued, and unpaid. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), women perform 3 hours and 2 minuets more of unpaid care work every day, than men. Meaning that per week, women spend a total of 26 hours performing unpaid labour, while men spend ten.

Due to the massive responsibilities of domestic labour and care, women and girls often miss quality, paid work and educational opportunities. When women have less time to spend working in paid roles or focused on their education, it directly affects the gender proportions in the workplace; ‘the bigger the difference in the division of care responsibilities between women and men, the higher the gender gaps in quality paid work.’ This attitude enforces stereotypes surrounding women’s abilities to do certain jobs, which has a knock-on effect on the quality of employment for women and pay imbalances between male and female co-workers.

Four ways to challenge unpaid care and domestic work

Women’s unpaid care and domestic work is largely invisible to policy agendas and hugely unvalued in economic terms. In response to this, feminist economists, civil society organisations and activists have been proposing a set of solutions to radically reprioritise care: the transformative ‘4R’s’ framework.

1. Recognise unpaid care and domestic work, which is done primarily by women and girls, as a type of work or production that has real value. Acknowledge and better understand the enormous contribution that women make to the economy by shouldering a disproportionate burden of unpaid care and domestic work. People and caring responsibilities ought to be at the centre of economic policies.

2. Reduce the total number of hours spent on unpaid care and domestic work through better access to affordable and quality time-saving infrastructure. Ensure sufficient public finances, which are raised and allocated to fund gender-responsive public services (GRPS), including infrastructure (electricity, water and sanitation facilities); education; health (including sexual and reproductive health) and care for the young and elderly.

3. Redistribute unpaid care and domestic work more fairly within the household and simultaneously shift the responsibility of unpaid care and domestic work to the state. Roll out progressive tax reforms to fund the provision of gender-responsive public services.

4. Represent the most marginalised caregivers and ensure that they have a voice in the design and delivery of policies, services and systems that affect their lives. Design and implement labour policies and social protection mechanisms to protect women and girls and enable their n access to decent and dignified work, in line with the IOL Decent Work Agenda.