Between 2013 and 2023, the transnational NGO Oxfam ran a global program called “WE-Care” (Women’s Economic Empowerment and Care) designed to encourage programmatic attention to unpaid care work. The We-Care program was part of a growing attention to care work, beginning in the 2010s, among the transnational networks of policy advocates who set the primary categories of knowledge production and intervention into gender inequality. In these networks, advocates frame gender inequality as a problem of unequally distributed and under valued care work in the home. Categories like “unpaid care work” and “UCDW (unpaid care and domestic work)” increasingly travel the same complex circuits of transnational women’s rights expertise, between multi-lateral organizations, transnational NGOs, national governments, and social movements, that were earlier traveled by categories like “empowerment” and “gender-based violence.” “Care work,” in other words, has gone global as a category for both explaining, and intervening in, gender inequality, picking up significant momentum over the course of the pandemic.

How do people draw on historically and socially specific practices of knowledge production to connect the abstract meanings of “care” to specific social practices and feature of lived experience? Answering this question can both help us explain why “care” has emerged, at this historical moment, as such a widespread tool for discussing gender inequality. It can also help us explore the effects of this policy framing, on communities and on policy experts alike.

In centering “care work” in global gender policy networks, gender policy advocates have succeeded in moving a radically transformative feminist framework onto mainstream policy agendas. Yet in doing so, they also are subject to a mode of policy thinking that “sees” injustice through quantitative data. From this perspective, ever-increasing social progress is facilitated through ever-improving modalities of measurement. The right data, from this utopian perspective, could unlock a more equal world. In the cosmopolitan, transnational world of global policy work, experts emphasize the “power of data” to make care work “visible.^⁠1” Policy advocates suggest that by quantifying discrepancies between men and women, they can convince powerful stakeholders across social scales from the household to the international stage to better value care work as a vital element of social life.

These dynamics suggest that one reason “care work” has emerged as a powerful conceptual tool in gender inequality advocacy has to do with the increasing value of quantified data in policy making worlds—in creating interventions that both respond to, and provide further material for, quantified representations of social transformation. Care work is thus co-produced, as a category, alongside a data ideology—a shared set of beliefs about what constitutes “data” and how that data act on the world—that connects visibility and value with quantification, and shapes development interventions in subtle ways.

This data ideology leads policy advocates to focus on temporal units like hours. The unit of the hour offers a seemingly universal unit of measure for comparing men and women, communities, societies, and nation-states to each other. In the feminist economics literature that policy advocates draw on, care work is made visible through conversion into time primarily through the time use study, a method that asks participants to map their use of time throughout the day.^⁠2 In programs like Oxfam’s We-Care project, the time use survey becomes both a tool for data collection and an anchoring metaphor, organizing a vast array of interventions. Time use surveys seem to offer clear and irrefutable evidence that women spend far, far more time than men on care work-related activities—the unequal use of hours, in other words, mapped across a binary gendered variable, makes gender inequality “visible” in terms that are thought to be convincing to powerful stake holders. These projects make “time” into a device that enables policy advocacy networks to “revalue” care not by assigning it direct economic value, measured in terms of currency, but by making it “visible” in terms of time, through continuous performances of data collection. Once measured as a form of temporal inequality, then, care work can then be addressed via the recognition (or measurement), reduction, and redistribution of caring labor, the famous “3 Rs” of unpaid care work policy advocacy (CITE). Diverse social interventions are thus bracketed together through the unit of the hour. Participatory community activities ask participants to first create daily time use diaries, then aggregate those into a grid of categories and then use dot stickers and flip charts to imagine redistributing tasks across community members. Participating organizations distribute simple materials rebranded as “time- and labour-saving equipment,” or TLSE (e.g. Newth 2016), such as jerrycans, fuel-efficient cookstoves, water taps and other sanitation infrastructure, and buckets. Elaborate influencing campaigns, in turn, center TLSE such as laundry buckets, weaving together time and labor saving equipment with globally-circulating narratives about modern conjugal romance and family values. For example, an award-winning campaign funded by Oxfam (and by Unilever) in the Philippines promoted a two-chambered laundry bucket by showing a married couple rediscovering the romance of everyday life by doing laundry side by side, hands brushing together atop a Unilever-branded Surf bar of laundry soap.

Moving from abstract data collection processes of the time use survey in to the visceral labor of social reproduction, TLSE reifies the utopian desires for recognition, reduction, and redistribution that animate care work data ideologies: its materiality makes care work legible; its technical affordances reduce time spent in care work. The data ideologies informing care work projects invest the bucket with a range of meanings, from feminist to conjugal to commercial. At the same time, objects like the bucket—and the romantic influencing campaign in which it features—animate and concretize those data ideologies, remaking gender inequality into a problem of hours to be managed.

¹ Quotation from the prepared remarks of Ekitela Lokaale, Kenyan ambassador to the United Nations, at the 2024 observation of the United Nation’s “International Day of Care and Support” (“International Day of Care and Support | UN Web TV” 2024)

² See for example (Budlender 2010; Esquivel et al. 2008; Folbre 2024)

Budlender, Debbie. 2010. Time Use Studies and Unpaid Care Work. Routledge.

Esquivel, Valeria, Debbie Budlender, Nancy Folbre, and Indira Hirway. 2008. “Explorations: Time-Use Surveys in the South.” Feminist Economics 14 (3): 107–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/13545700802075135.

Folbre, Nancy. 2024. “Care Data Infrastructure: A U.S. Case Study.” Review of Income and Wealth 70 (1): 239–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/roiw.12633.

“International Day of Care and Support | UN Web TV.” 2024. October 29. https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k13/k13yn06i8j.