Are you ready for the WIDE Conference 2009?

The 'care economy' is a recently coined term that refers to unremunerated work undertaken within the home and volunteer activities in the community that maintain the social fabric. Research indicates that almost 90% of global illness care is provided in the home. It is generally recognized that women and girls are the principle caregivers, due to a confluence of gendered family roles and patriarchal societal structures. If you approach the issue from an economic perspective, the unpayed work performed by women can be valued at around 11 trillion.



By Tina Parhakar


Despite the economic and even more important intrinsic value of women’s contribution, their care work has not been integrated into national income accounting systems. Nor have unpaid care workers been sufficiently supported. The economics are difficult to evaluate when taking into account the fact that women and girls are forced to leave paid jobs, schooling and other opportunities to provide care. This is referred to as the 'care gap' where women frequently subsidize social development sectors with their own time, resources and energy.


With a growing elderly population in Western countries and the HIV/AIDS epidemic having a growing toll in Africa and Asia, a disproportionate number of women and girls are being drawn into formal and informal care giving roles that remain embedded in a value system whereby such responsibilities and efforts are given little recognition. According to UNAIDS, in Africa twice as many young women were living with HIV as young men in 2004. Cultural norms and societal expectations on women along with a lack of health services make women not only physiologically and socially more vulnerable to infection but also more likely to bear the burden of the societal impacts of the disease.


Meanwhile, traditional government structures seem to implicitly rely on reconstructing a nostalgic family that never existed, and there is continued resistance from local, national and international policymakers to explicitly address this impending crisis. These structures and individuals must be pressured for solutions that address diverse families and communities as they grow more vulnerable, fractured, and ultimately, overworked.


While the economist Diane Elson notes that 'there is a risk the use of the term “care” will mystify the relationship between the provider and the receiver,' she ultimately recognizes that the concept 'signals the fundamental importance of interpersonal attention to other people's needs in the maintenance of human societies' (2003). The role of feminists, in addition to making ourselves visible, is to provide an alternative definition for the 'care economy' phenomenon. Creating a space for changed emphasis, which may include alternative buzzwords such as 'productive care' or 'a caring economy,' whereby caregiving and all other work is valued for its contribution to overall well-being (rather than for its addition to an indicator such as GDP) may be a significant improvement.


A second and related area ripe for feminist research is how to decrease the influence of the tropes of femininity and masculinity that complicate agency, choice and freedom when it comes to caregiving. Many women feel they must fulfill obligations tied to love and concern for their relations while many men are structurally constrained from fathering and other caregiving functions, for example, through the idea of 'breadwinner.' So to conclude, next year's conference is sure to be a meeting of minds that has as its goal a more intergenerationally and intragenerationally interconnected and equitable world.


This article has been published in Daily Visions 11-10-2008