Reimagining care needs caution: Interpreting the new economic visibility

This article is authored by Sona Mitra, senior fellow, School of Liberal Studies, BML Munjal University.

International Day of Care and Support was observed on October 29. First observed in 2023 following its declaration by the UN General Assembly, the day has been championed by UN Women, the ILO and the Global Alliance for Care to advance women’s economic autonomy, decent work and better conditions for care workers and their communities. It seeks to make visible the economic costs of care, its immense contribution to the economy, and the rights and entitlements of the millions of women who perform much of the world’s care work. It also calls for greater investments and resource mobilisation to build resilient and sustainable care ecosystems.

Women caregiver and economy (representational image) (Voices of Youth)

The Covid-19 years emphasised the severity of care needs and the role played by women to deliver all the care services--unrecognised, unremunerated, uncounted yet leading the world to normalcy. This was more prevalent among women from the global south where public health infrastructures in most cases were unable to respond to the large-scale health care needs of the population in those countries.

Consequently, data from across countries showed the increased contribution of women, both unpaid caregivers within households and paid health care workers, to tackle the pandemic, almost as economies fell back massively on the labour of women. The efforts that brought care into mainstream discussions acknowledged a flawed ecosystem with huge gaps in care infrastructures and services, compounded with lack of adequate social protection for careworkers, absence of women-friendly policies at workplaces and clearly unable to meet the needs of women carers, whether paid or unpaid. The deliberations at subsequent global platforms since Covid-19, like the G20, BRICS, UN General Assembly, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and even the UNFCCC-COP, recognised the significance of investing in building caring economies as an investment in economic growth.

Such consensus around centralising care within global policy discussions are certainly encouraging, yet these are not free from certain contradictions. The emerging focus on reimagining care systems correctly emphasises care as a public good, a human right and not only a social infrastructure but also an economic one. However, this is also leading to an emergence of recasting care expenditures as investments with returns, albeit over the long-term. Women, shouldering the lion’s share of this work are treated simplistically as agents of growth, who need to be freed of unpaid and care responsibilities, rather than as individual humans with rights.

For example, several reports and discussion papers published by the institutions such as the IMF, World Bank or even the WEF has been increasingly advocating for investing in affordable childcare as a means of enabling women to enter paid employment, improving labour productivity and generating economic returns. It is helping governments to make an important shift from treating care as a private household responsibility to recognising it as essential economic and social infrastructure. However, the framing becomes problematic when childcare is valued primarily for its contribution to market productivity rather than as a social right and a collective responsibility. It reinforces the existing primary roles and responsibilities of women in childcare; childcare services are often justified as a means of freeing women to participate in paid work, rather than redistributing unpaid care responsibilities between women and men or across households, the state and the market.

The same narrative keeps care work and workers undervalued. The expansion of the childcare services in the market depends on poorly paid, predominantly female workers. In India and around the world, more than 80% of women domestic workers belong in the informal sector; as per subsequent ILO reports on wages and earnings since 2018, globally care workers earn approximately 6% less on an average than workers in any other occupation. Clearly, access becomes an equity and affordability issues. It runs the risk of instrumentalising ‘childcare’ as a mere lever for pushing more women into the labour force to drive economic growth. It treats care as an input to the productive capacity of an economy, and ignores the wider role of care in building equitable societies and human lives.

The framings thus remain incomplete. It may lead to higher economic growth but would fail the real test of building caring economies that is intrinsically linked to closing gender gaps and empowering women.

As care increasingly enters the vocabulary of global economic governance, it is often justified through its contribution to human capital, labour-market participation and growth. The narrative approaches it as a technical problem--one that treats unpaid and care work as just a constraint to women’s employment.

The critical question continues to persist--whether this new economic visibility has the capacity to transform the gendered organisation of care work and social reproduction or merely make it more productive for the market?

For decades feminist scholars have challenged economic models that kept the process of social reproduction, where ‘care work’ constitutes the main laboring component, as peripheral to capitalism and relegated the actors, mainly women, into a secondary position within the economy. Renowned scholar Nancy Fraser in her seminal work Contradictions of Capital and Care emphasised this point and further added that current world systems in its drive for profit maximisation often undermines the conditions for sustaining care and social reproduction. The thrust of reimagining care and transforming it into a strategic economic sector acknowledges this historical neglect, yet risks reproducing the economic hierarchies it seeks to overcome and continues to treat social reproduction as subordinate to market production.

Consequently, the narrative misses the complete absence of redistribution of gains achieved on the backs of women’s labour, both physical and emotional, and dilutes the rights-based claim on gender equality and women’s empowerment. It values care primarily through measurable returns, such as jobs created or GDP effects, and overlooks its wider contribution to societal well-being and human development.

The reimagination of alternative care systems thus cannot stop at discussions around financing to employ women in the labour force and drive productivity and economic growth. The emphasis needs to go beyond and be built upon a much deeper and holistic understanding of alternative care systems that empower women, transform their status in the economy, elevate them from being a primary caregiver and a secondary earner to decision-makers and leaders. It must make gender equality and women’s empowerment as a central argument and an overarching principle for drawing up inclusive public policies and make the economy more equitable for those who care.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Sona Mitra, senior fellow, School of Liberal Studies, BML Munjal University.