In a seminar on women and development that served as a prelude to the United Nations International Women’s Year (IWY) conference in Mexico City in 1975, the renowned Hungarian sociologist Alexander Szalai reported that wage-earning women were spending more time on household labor in 1968 than they had in 1952. Drawing on his extensive research with time-budget reports, he noted that all the improvements in labor-saving devices and availability of market substitutes for social-reproductive labor seemed not to alleviate women’s burden at all, particularly if they also worked in the labor market.  (A year earlier, Joann Vanek reported similar findings about US women.)

Working groups in this seminar urged governments to “rethink and redefine the concept of economic activities to include the vast production carried out within the domestic sphere” and that “all persons performing domestic service (including housewives) and other unpaid work in the informal sector should be brought within the national labor and social security laws, and the monetary value of their contribution added to the statistics of national accounting systems.”

Participants in the IWY conference — a global gathering of journalists, government delegates, and NGO activists — envisioned what Shahra Razavi would later describe as the care diamond, imagining that the drudgery of women’s subsistence labors would be alleviated by a constellation of market substitutions, state programs, and the redistribution of duties within households and communities. By the time they all departed Mexico City three weeks later, these lofty goals had given way to a technocratic World Plan of Action centered on preparing women for and incorporating them into the paid labor market as well as the Declaration of Mexico, which focused on national economic sovereignty and included Zionism alongside racism, apartheid, and imperialism (but explicitly not sexism) among the obstacles to women’s emancipation.  Amid relentless arguments about everything from abortion to Zionism, the only thing all participants seemed to agree on was the urgent need to alleviate women’s subsistence labor burdens.

IWY kicked off the UN Women’s Decade, which included two more global women’s conferences (Copenhagen in 1980 and Nairobi in 1985) and fostered an ambitious program of data collection supported not only by the UN itself but also by private foundations, thinktanks, universities, and governments at every level and around the world.  Particularly throughout the Global South, where UN agencies occupy a significant share of the research and funding landscape, the UN Decade legitimated research that had previously been conducted only on the margins of research institutions, if at all.

The UN Decade also built a substantial infrastructure of research and data collection. The 1979 ratification of the Convention of the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) imposed reporting requirements on its signatories (which still do not include the United States).  INSTRAW (International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women) and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) sponsored research on women around the world.  The Voluntary Fund for IWY became UNIFEM (the UN Development Fund for Women), which provided financing and technical support for small-scale development projects. 

In 2010, an array of agencies, several of them formed during the UN Decade,  consolidated under the umbrella of UN Women, which has continued to support research on women and girls and to insist on attending to gender differences on an array of issues.  UN Women’s most recent annual report listed as its second most important accomplishment — after promoting gender equality — the increase in recognition of care work.  Over the past five years, the International Labor Organization (ILO) has considerably increased its attention to informal and unpaid care labor.

Data collection and dissemination is certainly among the UN’s strong suits, and there is no question that all this research and data collection has yielded a more detailed picture that was already sketched in some detail in 1975:  that women perform a vastly disproportionate share of unpaid household and subsistence labors and that this labor distribution is often enforced with various forms of state and household violence.  Alexander Szalai reported in 1975 that women in the paid labor force performed an hour more domestic work than men on their workdays and 2.5 hours more on their days off; UN Women’s report from last year indicates that women spend 2.3 more hours per day on care work than men do. 

These hours are allocated unevenly, and diverse methodologies compound the challenges of interpreting the data. Kenyan women purportedly spend about 4.5 hours per day on care work, while US women only spent 2.7 hours per day on “household activities.”  Some of this difference results from a more equitable gender distribution of labor, some of it results from the fact that households in wealthier countries more frequently turn to market services to provide care labor.

Both UN agencies and government programs continue to focus overwhelmingly on women’s incorporation into the labor market, emphasizing the importance of labor standards and just compensation, but have only just begun to scratch the surface on labor standards and recognition for unpaid labor.  Reflecting the common-sensical acceptance of market dominance, advocates of recognizing care labor often point to the ways that such recognition would create jobs and grow economies.

If you were to read a transcript of a recent podcast about the role of data collection in advancing gender equality, you could be forgiven for thinking that it came from one of the many IWY panels of experts in 1975.  You could simply swap out the Ford Foundation for the Gates Foundation; replace household labor with the more capacious concept of care; and substitute the IWY themes of equality, development, and peace with the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals.  The idea of women’s microcredit, which fostered Women’s World Banking after IWY, now centers on ensuring that women entrepreneurs make up a growing percentage of banks’ loan portfolios because women business owners are more likely to hire women.  As in 1975, it is striking how quickly the conversation shifts from recognizing indispensable and largely unpaid care labor to finding ways to pull women into the labor market.

Quite a few countries throughout the Global South — Kenya, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Mexico, to name only a few — have promoted policies that purport to recognize care work and the care economy.  These programs often center on creating more market services for care — whether privately or publicly funded — and incorporating women into labor markets, and several are struggling to secure the political and financial support to make them sustainable.

So, here is the challenge to you, dear Care Talk reader:  what are the other options?  Can we — after a half century of neoliberal orthodoxy — imagine a way to recognize the value of care work without pricing it as a market service?  How can we recognize the importance of care work as more than a means to allow women to devote their labor power outside their families and communities?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. The image is based on the logo that Valerie Pettis designed for IWY.