Happy International Women’s Day. But how equitable are we?

As the world wakes up to greetings and grand sales offers on March 8 in celebration of International Women’s Day (IWD), a large section of women, oblivious to these churnings, have woken up at 4 am to attend to their domestic chores of fetching firewood and water, cooking, and cleaning. Many are preparing to leave for the day’s work on the fields or work sites only to do a ‘second shift’ after returning home. This year’s theme for the IWD is #Embrace Equity. But how equitable is our society when it comes to sharing household work?

Women around the world share a disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic work. According to the Indian Time Use Survey (2019), women in India spend a significantly more time in both unpaid domestic services (299 minutes by women and 97 minutes by men on an average in a day) and unpaid care services for household members such as caring for the children, elderly and the sick (134 and 76 minutes on an average in a day for women and men respectively).

Several feminists have rightly argued that the reproductive labour of women in households remains largely invisible, even though care is fundamental to human wellbeing and to the functioning of economies. Marxist feminists argue that the workers’ who serve the modern capitalist system, as well as their children who grow up to become the future workers of the system, are sustained by the nurture and care provided mostly by women in families. However, this important role is completely undermined.

Mainstream economic arguments in favour of the sexual division of labour with women as ‘caregivers’ and men as ‘breadwinners’ is premised on an oversimplified understanding that specialisation in roles enhances the joint productivity of the household. However, the distributive aspects of such a division of labour are ignored. The assumption of an altruistic head of the household who takes care of the interests and preferences of all household members eschews the entire issue of inequalities that arise in intra-household sharing of resources. The fact that several governments across the world directed social assistance payments to the bank accounts of women during Covid-19 is evidence that a fair division of resources within
households is a myth.

It is also important to understand that unpaid domestic work occurs at the expense of paid work, and such an intersection has important implications for gender equality. The PLFS quarterly data for July-Sept 2022 reports female labour force participation at 21.7 per cent, while it is 73.4 per cent for men. Several studies have shown that women are unable to find jobs that are compatible with care work and other responsibilities at home. Without paid employment, women’s agency to bargain and negotiate for themselves in matters of household decision-making is compromised. Women also become more vulnerable to income shocks as was seen in the case of Covid-19 widows who were unexpectedly exposed to the reality of finding jobs to sustain themselves.

It must also be noted that the undervaluation of women’s care work also extends to paid non-family workers. For instance, Anganwadi and Asha workers in India are grossly underpaid and not formally recognised for their work. They continue to be treated as ‘voluntary workers’ to be paid only ‘honorariums.’ The State reinforces gender stereotypes when it hires only women in the provision of crucial social services but fails to provide them adequate remuneration in denial of their towering role in areas of child health, nutrition and
community education.

Societies need to urgently engage with the Triple R’s—recognize, reduce, and redistribute—as articulated by Diane Elson (2017) to address the problem of unpaid work burden on women. Recognising the trends and patterns in unpaid domestic and care work is an important step in making such work visible. Unpaid work burden can be reduced through infrastructural support such as access to safe water, reliable transport, and subsidised clean energy like cooking cylinders. This will reduce the time that women would otherwise spend arranging for these.

The redistribution of unpaid work from women to the State can take place through the public provisioning of free child-care services, canteens, and laundrettes, thereby transferring such work to paid workers. Gender equality and empowerment will remain a distant dream if public policy does not address the overwhelming burden of domestic and care work on women.

(The writer teaches economics at Christ University, Bengaluru.)