Invest in the Care Economy

Which parent is primarily responsible for the hands-on work that goes into raising children until they are adults? This involves making sure that children are doing their homework, doing well in exams, participating in extracurricular activities, are well-fed, healthy, regular in school, and are emotionally secure and nurtured. If both parents are in paid jobs, which parent is more likely to take time off to stay home with a sick child or help the kid prepare for an exam?

In India, like elsewhere in the world, it is typically the mother.

Who is primarily responsible for taking care of elderly family members, especially when they are sick or dependent?

In India, much more so than elsewhere in the world, it is the woman in the household (daughter-in-law or daughter) responsible for eldercare, despite the strong belief that sons provide old-age support to their parents.

Who takes care of the everyday household chores: cooking, cleaning, dishes,

laundry, and groceries? For many Indian households without a direct water and gas connection inside their homes, this involves arranging fuel and water before the actual tasks begin.

In South Asia, these tasks are performed every day, often multiple times a day, and women are predominantly responsible for them.

These activities are categorized as Unpaid Domestic and Care Work (UDCW). While men and women both participate in unpaid work, India’s first national Time Use

Survey (TUS), conducted in 2019, reveals that over 92 percent of women participate in unpaid work, compared to only 50 percent of men.

My estimates from TUS 2019 reveal that the female-to-male ratio of time spent in domestic work in India is high by international standards: 9.55 for domestic work and

3.5 for care work. This means women spend 10x more hours on domestic and care work compared to men

A comparison with other countries reveals that this ratio is among the highest in the world (See Figure 1 using comparable data for 2014 from Our World In Data).

Figure 1:

Value of Women’s Unpaid Domestic and Care Work

Oxfam (2020) made back-of-the-envelope estimates to calculate the value of women’s unpaid labour in each country and found that women’s unpaid work amounted to roughly USD 10.9 trillion globally(1). Oxfam multiplied the number of women(2)  above the age of 15 by the hours per year the average person spent on unpaid labour. They further multiplied the total hours by the nation’s minimum wage, converted to dollars using 2018 purchasing power parity. For countries with no minimum wage, Oxfam used living wage estimates(3).

Using a similar rough calculation presented in (Appendix B3), State Bank of India’s

EcoWrap series (SBI, 2023) calculated that the total monetary equivalent of women’s unpaid labour in India was INR 22.7 trillion (USD 270 billion), which is 7.5 percent of GDP. This is a rough estimate based on the estimated number of women and assuming a common national-level monthly wage of INR 5000 (~ USD 60) in rural areas and INR 8000 (~ USD 96) in urban areas. This can be further refined by calculating the wages and numbers of women at the state level.

Policy Solutions: Invest in the Care Economy

Given that India is currently stuck in a high UDCW and low LFP trap, which we should recognize as two sides of the same coin, what should the focus of policymaking be? Should policy focus on releasing women from UDCW and moving them towards paid work or on reducing barriers to paid work, which is likely to attract women to paid  work and push them to step out, thereby reducing the UDCW? Both, obviously. This piece focuses on policy solutions that would lower the onerous responsibility of daily  UDCW disproportionately falling on women.

ILO (2018) presents cross-country data (Figure 2) on public expenditure on selected care policies. It shows that in countries that tend to invest more in a combination of care policies that offset the care contingencies of the working-age population (i.e., maternity, sickness or disability), the employment rates of women tend to be higher than those in countries investing comparatively less. Figure 2 reveals that while there are exceptions (like Indonesia), by and large, “regions affording comprehensive maternity protection and paid leave for fathers, in conjunction with a relatively generous provision of early childhood care and education services, generally have higher average maternal employment rates.” (p. xxxvi)

Figure 2:

The care economy has several elements. In India, there is some discussion on childcare but not enough on other aspects. The central government has a childcare leave (CCL) policy which allows for 730 days of paid leave to female employees during their entire service period, for taking care of a maximum of two children under the age of 18. This is over and above maternity leave.

The explicit mention of female employees as beneficiaries can be viewed as a valid recognition of the fact that it is primarily mothers who undertake the heavy lifting of raising children beyond the first six months after birth (the period considered under maternity leave). Men are eligible for CCL only if they are single fathers.

While such a gendered policy targeted towards mothers can be justified on pragmatic grounds – mothers are direct caregivers much more so than fathers are – it can also lead to legitimate questions on whether the law should be putting a seal of legitimacy on inequitable norms. This is a genuine conundrum because if the inequitable gendered norms are firmly entrenched, offering CCL to fathers might result in a situation where they avail of paid leave, but do not, in effect, contribute to the multitude of daily tasks that constitute childcare, including providing the emotional and logistical anchoring during stressful periods, like the board exams.

If women are the ones bearing this responsibility, over and above multiple other contributions to the household, their workplace needs to recognize this and provide some accommodation, which presumably is the intention behind the CCL.

This is a central government provision that is not binding on the states. Recently a government employee in Himachal Pradesh was denied the CCL. The Supreme Court declared this denial as a violation of working women’s ‘constitutional right’.

There are several questions that this episode raises which highlight the complications inherent in this policy. If this is a constitutional right, should this central provision not be binding on states? Why is this provision, unlike the provision on maternity leave, applicable only to government employment? Would making this mandatory in the private sector worsen employer bias against women, i.e., would employers be less likely to hire women? Finally, how many establishments have the bandwidth to implement such a policy?

Let’s look at the last question. Provisions of the Maternity Benefit Act, or the

POSH (Prevention of Sexual Harassment) Act are applicable to establishments with  10 or more employees. We need to note that the overwhelming majority of firms in India are not covered by any of these benefits because they are too small. The

Economic Census reveals that 98 percent firms are ‘micro’, i.e., they have less than 10 employees.

Official data from the Unincorporated Enterprises Survey for 2015-16 reveals that the average number of people working in an enterprise is 1.78, i.e., less than 2. Out of these enterprises, 61.8 percent have one worker, 35.6 percent have 2-5 workers, and 1.9 have 6-10 workers. Only 0.8 percent of all unincorporated enterprises have more than 10 workers.

Even in the registered manufacturing sector covered by the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI), where one would expect individual firms to be large, data reveals that 30 percent of such establishments have less than 10 employees.

The ground reality is that the pro-women laws, which are meant to ensure constitutional rights, apply to a small minority of employed women. In the

larger establishments (i.e. private establishments with more than 10 workers) where POSH and maternity laws are applicable, research hints at perverse consequences  –   these have the potential to worsen employer bias against women in the short run.

This doesn’t mean that there should be no pro-women laws, even if applicable to a tiny proportion of workers. Wherever possible, the legal structure needs to guarantee women’s rights.

However, we also need to think more broadly about how to effectively ameliorate the burden of domestic work and care that is seen as essentially the mothers’ responsibility. This would require several elements, of which the CCL could be one part, with the recognition that it is genuinely difficult for smaller establishments to

implement. Also, employers can, at best, provide partial support to their employees for the UDCW responsibilities. The solution, which should be multifaceted, needs to involve employers but go beyond employers to other stakeholders.

The 3Rs framework

The real problem is not that care work is an integral part of our lives, but that care work (whether paid or not) is mainly seen as a woman’s job.

The Care Diamond shows that care can be provided by four actors:

The “Triple R” framework shows the way forward – it recommends recognizing, reducing, and redistributing the responsibility of childcare, which can only happen if care is placed at the core of economic and societal action.

Today’s children are tomorrow’s workforce and therefore childcare is a social responsibility. We need to recognize that childcare consists of a set of multiple, complex, daily, repetitive, physical and emotional tasks that mothers perform, over and above the myriad daily tasks. Recognition will make the issue visible.

How can this load be reduced? Through redistribution, both within the household and outside. Within the household, the redistribution will occur through sharing among household members, most importantly by fathers pitching in, not as occasional babysitters, but by being a part of the child’s daily journey. At the moment, sharing outside the household happens mainly through expensive private childcare, which very few can afford. Both in urban and rural areas, we need good quality, affordable, reliable, and safe childcare in our neighbourhoods. This can be provided both by the government and private players.

To sum up, we need to invest in the care economy. Households, communities, organs of the state machinery and private players need to a) recognise that the overwhelming responsibility of UDCW falls on women, b) reduce this load on

Women, and c) redistribute workload more equitably within families and through the establishment of robust, reliable and affordable care facilities. Investments in the care economy can have multiple benefits – availability of care facilities would free up women’s time that they can divide between other types of work (including entering the labour force) and leisure; women’s labour force participation rates would increase both via direct employment in the care economy as well as indirectly by freeing up women’s time, enabling them to participate in other jobs. Finally, for a

labour-abundant country such as India, the care economy can be an ideal arena for job creation as it is a labour-intensive sector, generating green jobs.

(1) This made global headlines when the New York Times featured a lead story focusing attention on this estimate: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/04/opinion/women-unpaid-labor.html

(2) Using UN population estimates from https://population.un.org/wpp/Download/Standard/Population/

(3) From https://wageindicator.org/salary/wages-in-context