Forms of Project: A Love Letter

Women’s unpaid care and domestic work is gaining relevance in policy-making as well as in academia. Feminist scholars and activists have lobbied successfully for the integration of unpaid care and domestic work into the Sustainable Development Goals (Goal 5.4) of the United Nations in the hope for greater recognition of women’s contribution to the economy. Policy documents about social reproduction highlight women’s disproportionate share of reproductive activities as an obstacle to women’s economic empowerment and as a relic of ‘traditional’ gender roles. Social reproduction is thereby not understood as a merit in itself, but as an obstacle to women’s participation in paid labour. Policy implications will enable certain empowerment effects for some women, but at the same time promote the increasing privatization and commodification of reproductive work across the globe. Rising inequalities between the Global North and South and between women along the categories of class and race will be one major result. To theoretically explain such contradictory effects of the recognition of social reproduction, I use the concept of ‘enclosures’ based on Marx’ ‘primitive accumulation’. Feminist scholars use the concept to explain how unpaid care and housework is commodified or de-commodified to integrate women into the paid labour force or to reduce the costs of social reproduction according to the needs of the economy. The sudden interest in unpaid care and domestic work e.g. in the Sustainable Development Goals can therefore be seen as process of double enclosure, which integrates women into the paid labour force, but also sets the grounds for the further commodification of domestic and care work. This paper aims to critically discuss the sudden interest in unpaid domestic and care work and its contradictory effects from a Marxist feminist perspective and reflects on feminist strategies and movements in global governance. After introducing Marxist perspectives on social reproduction, the question if and how feminist ideas and concepts have been appropriated, the effects and implications of global policies on social reproduction and global inequalities, as well as possible counter-strategies will be discussed.

This report analyses the issue of unpaid care and domestic work in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) using Oxfam’s Rapid Care Assessment tool. The report explores how different communities across OPT define unpaid care and domestic work through a gender lens; how they distribute this work across the household, the average hours spent by women and men on care work and how intersectional factors influence this time allocation. The report examines the trends that influence those roles and responsibilities, particularly in a context of protracted crisis, and how issues like economic deterioration, electricity crisis and climate change in the Gaza Strip increase the care work carried out by women and girls. The report highlights areas for action: recognizing and reducing the responsibility of care work for women and girls, raising awareness and educating about the redistribution of unpaid care and domestic work at the household level between men and women, and at the state level, accessing affordable basic services.

The origin of the term "care work" is in the debates on the "domestic work" of socialist feminists of the seventies. From these discussions, since mid eighties, feminism has shown how domestic and care work that women are doing allows men to carry out their activities in the public sphere, to children have values and standards, training and physical and emotional development and to communities have some social cohesion. Despite the importance of domestic work, the social norm of employment in the postwar social contract granted citizenship rights only to persons employed, so that domestic and care work, as not being paid, don't granted this rights. Therefore, in addition to clarify the term, this text aims to assess care work as a source of rights assignment. If "we are challenged to build a new culture of transnational law, able to meet the remaining systemic crises" (Fariñas, 2010:120) voices like care and care work enables us to build foundations of the current unequal rights and deconstruct the narrative of the crisis, by creating new proposals more just and egalitarian for the entire population.

Social care and domestic work, despite being crucial for societal well-being, remain undervalued, unpaid and invisible in most economic calculations. Globally, women perform almost three times more unpaid care work as compared to men. The COVID-19 pandemic amplified gender roles and disparities in care responsibilities, affecting women’s labour market participation negatively. This study examined the gendered impacts of ‘work from home’ (WFH) among 488 information technology (IT) professionals in India during the pandemic. Using a time-use survey, the study assessed changes in gender norms and caregiving responsibilities during WFH. The authors found that factors such as marital status, age and caregiving responsibilities influence the ability of female IT professionals to negotiate care responsibilities. The authors’ findings indicate that during the pandemic, the time saved from commuting was transferred to domestic and care work. Even as men stepped up to contribute towards care roles, women were primarily responsible for domestic work like cooking and cleaning. In dual-income households, men contributed to childcare and elder care, yet traditional gender roles continued to persist. While WFH caused temporary shifts in care work distribution, it did not fundamentally alter entrenched gender norms. The authors’ study calls for institutionalising care work within workplaces and adopting gender-responsive policies to support female employees. Building on the goals of gender equality (SDG 5) and Decent Work Agenda (SDG 8), the study proposes a re-evaluation of flexibility at work and the creation of a care infrastructure and policies at work that can foster a more inclusive society by redistributing caregiving responsibilities across genders.

Care work is essential for individuals, society and the economy. However, it is overwhelmingly done by women and girls, which restricts their ability to participate in education, paid work, politics and community life. In low-resource settings, fetching water or preparing food can be particularly burdensome. In 2018–2019, Oxfam's Women's Economic Empowerment and Care (WE-Care) programme conducted a Household Care Survey (HCS) in five informal settlements of Nairobi, Kenya, to understand the gendered patterns of unpaid care and domestic work across these communities. The study finds that women spend considerably more time than men on unpaid care work per day. It also finds that access to nearby water sources and health care, and ownership of fuel and washing-related equipment, are all associated with reduced hours of care work for women. In addition, community expectations and fear of sanctions for deviating from social norms play an important role in maintaining the gendered division of care work. The report presents recommendations for government, the private sector and development practitioners on how they can contribute to the recognition, reduction and redistribution of unpaid care work.

The Caring Majority: Building a Coalition Around Domestic Workers' Rights

The United Nations collects data at gigabyte scale from the member countries for sustainable development goals, and recognizes the impact big data collection has on opportunities and risks for sustainable development. The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) open data hub provided a dataset that details the "proportion of time spent on unpaid domestic chores and care work" world wide. This primary dataset is only a portion of the data available related to the research area. This data contains many related variables, such as the population's age, sex, and location metrics. In an effort to better understand the impact of unpaid domestic work, the dataset was analyzed in conjunction with another dataset from the UN Statistics Division that details the rate of divorce/separation in the world population. Our analysis included methods such as principal component analysis, the k-means clustering algorithm, the random forest clustering algorithm, and implementing a neural network. The principal components were clustered using the k-means algorithm to cluster the variables in a manner that explains the variance present in the dataset. The analysis found that age, sex, and location demographics are key variables that explain the diverse variation between countries and the percentage of time spent on unpaid domestic work.Machine learning algorithms enabled the confirmation of this relationship. Using the key variables identified, a random forest of decision trees and a neural network were generated to classify the percentage of time spent on unpaid domestic work. Similarly, the random forest algorithm and a neural network were also implemented to classify geographical regions. These models were compared to determine the strength of the relationship between age, sex, location metrics, the percentage of time spent, and geographical regions.The analysis detailed in this work strives to identify the social factors that classify the percentage of time spent on unpaid domestic work in accordance with the UN SDG 5.4, which is to "recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure, and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate."

Most feminists have argued that the gendered division of labour, according to which men specialise in career and paid employment while women specialise in unpaid domestic and care work, is a profound instance of gender injustice. Many liberals have argued that, even if the gendered division of labour creates and sustains inequality, it is essential to protect people’s ability to choose the family structure that works best for them. On this issue, feminists and liberals seem to be in stalemate. This chapter argues that the solution to the gendered division of labour is not to elevate paid employment above unpaid carework, as a liberal perspective tends to do. Instead, the solution starts with recognising that the gendered division of labour depends upon the systematic, enduring devaluation of care and domestic work and proceeds by resisting that devaluation. In this context, the injustice of the gendered division of labour cannot be solved by pushing mothers into paid employment. For the gendered division of labour truly to be undermined, women must be valued for what they do, including care and domestic work.

An increasing number of women migrate alone from poor countries in order to work in the domestic and care sector of wealthier countries. The growing demand for domestic and care workers’ labor — an estimated 53 million of transnational and internal female migrants around the world are involved in domestic and care work (ILO 2013) — has fuelled the autonomous migration of women and the feminization of migration (Kofman, Phizacklea, Raghuram, and Sales 2000; Sassen 2003; Zlotnik 2003). Domestic and care workers are particularly vulnerable since they work in the private households of employers. They work in isolation, the remuneration is low and in many countries, domestic workers are excluded from the protection afforded by labor laws (Gallotti 2009; ILO 2010). This type of work is devalued and considered as unskilled. Moreover, live-in domestic and care workers are separated from their own families. This book is about the family rights of domestic workers and caregivers, in various contexts.

International labour migration has expanded across the globe creating new migration patterns within countries in the southern hemisphere. Domestic service is one such informal labour sector where international labour migration is taking place. This large-scale transnational labour migration from Southeast Asian nations, in particular, is due to an increased demand for domestic and care workers in the service industries of countries in the northern and southern hemisphere. Domestic service has become one of the key drivers of female labour migration. Hochschild refers to this type of migration as ‘care drain’, in which women from Third World countries leave their own children in the care of female relatives back home and migrate to care for the children and households of professional women in the West to support their own families. The intimacy that often characterizes the relationship between the employer and the domestic worker makes her seem like a family member – not a worker. This sense of intimacy can be misleading, however, as the relationship between the domestic worker and the employer is characterized by a difference of status, resources and power. According to an estimate given by the International Labour Organization (hereinafter referred to as ILO), domestic work constitutes one of the largest, yet least visible service industries in the world. The increase in female migration and the nature of domestic work constitutes a major challenge to the protection of the human and labour rights of domestic workers. As domestic work is performed within the privacy of the home, it is frequently excluded from the scope of labour legislation. Human Rights Watch has stated that almost 30 per cent of the world’s domestic workers are employed in countries where they are excluded from national labour laws, including weekly rest days, limits to hours of work, minimum wage coverage and overtime pay. Even when partially covered, domestic workers are often excluded from key protections such as minimum age requirements, maternity leave, social security and occupational health measures. Historically, performing domestic service for another’s household has been an important way of earning a livelihood for women. Affluent families in both developing and developed countries engage both local and migrant women domestic workers. In recent years, Pakistan has become an employment destination for migrant Filipino domestic workers (hereinafter referred to as MFDWs), who are being employed by affluent Pakistani households, despite the presence of a large number of Pakistani female domestic workers available to take such positions. The employment of MFDWs is increasingly a marker of status and affluence, reflecting the racialized and class hierarchies that continue to infuse the sphere of domestic work, both in Pakistan and elsewhere. Based on a small, exploratory, sample qualitative study of the lived experiences of MFDWs, this chapter addresses the question of whether international human rights and labour standards can provide protection and empowerment to MFDWs. Drawing upon the feminist concept of ‘women’s agency’, this chapter examines the extent to which law reforms, drawing upon evolving human rights standards, can support migrant domestic workers’ capacity for agency, and more effective implementation of decent work standards.

Care

Women’s1 lifelong health and nutrition status is intricately related to their reproductive history, including the number and spacing of their pregnancies and births, and for how long and how intensively they breastfeed their children. In turn, women’s reproductive biology is closely linked to their social roles and situation, including regarding economic disadvantage and disproportionate unpaid work. Recognizing, as well as reducing and redistributing women’s care and domestic work (known as the ‘Three Rs’), is an established framework for addressing women’s inequitable unpaid care work. However, the care work of breastfeeding presents a dilemma, and is even a divisive issue, for advocates of women’s empowerment, because reducing breastfeeding and replacing it with commercial milk formula risks harming women’s and children’s health. It is therefore necessary for the interaction between women’s reproductive biology and infant care role to be recognized in order to support women’s human rights and enable governments to implement economic, employment and other policies to empower women. In this paper, we argue that breastfeeding–like childbirth–is reproductive work that should not be reduced and cannot sensibly be directly redistributed to fathers or others. Rather, we contend that the Three Rs agenda should be reconceptualized to isolate breastfeeding as ‘sexed’ care work that should be supported rather than reduced with action taken to avoid undermining breastfeeding. This means that initiatives toward gender equality should be assessed against their impact on women’s ability to breastfeed. With this reconceptualization, adjustments are also needed to key global economic institutions and national statistical systems to appropriately recognize the value of this work. Additional structural supports such as maternity protection and childcare are needed to ensure that childbearing and breastfeeding do not disadvantage women amidst efforts to reduce gender pay gaps and gender economic inequality. Distinct policy interventions are also required to facilitate fathers’ engagement in enabling and supporting breastfeeding through sharing the other unpaid care work associated with parents’ time-consuming care responsibilities, for both infants and young children and related household work.

Objective: This paper analyses the association between women's gender ideologies and domestic work performance in Spain using an innovative approach. Background: Following recent literature, gender ideologies are understood as multidimensional instead of focusing only on support for gendered or joint spheres. We hypothesize that some dimensions of gender ideology -belief in gendered spheres- will be positively associated with domestic work, whereas others -intensive parenthood- will be associated with doing more care work. Depending on how these dimensions are combined, they might cancel out or reinforce each other. Method: Using data from the "Encuesta de Fecundidad 2018" (N=14,556), a nationally representative survey, five gender ideologies are estimated using Latent Class Analysis. Linear regression models test the association between ideologies and domestic and care work. Results: The results show that ideologies that combine support for equality in the labor market with intensive parenthood traits are associated with more traditional divisions of domestic and care work. Conclusion: The consideration of the multidimensionality of gender ideologies seems a promising strategy to factor in analyses of the domestic division of work.

The phenomenon of migrant workers finding domestic and care work in the homes and institutions of countries wealthier than their own uncovers much about social change in the twenty-first century. First, it reveals the consequences of women taking on more responsibilities to earn income but without a significant rebalancing of their care responsibilities either with male partners or through state support. In the poorer regions of the world, unemployment, violence, poverty and aspirations for a better life push some women into emigrating to earn for their families. This also exposes an asymmetrical geopolitical solution to the so-called ‘care deficit’ pursued by richer states, accentuated by the demographics of ageing societies and restructured welfare regimes on the one side, and the care crises in the poorer regions on the other. The transnational movement of (mainly) women into care and domestic work, as well as nurses, pharmacists and doctors into health care saves social expenditure costs while intensifying the lack of care resources in the countries of origin of those migrant workers.

Quality sleep is vital for good health. Although it is known that workhours affect sleep quality, it is not known at what point workhours begin to compromise sleep. Few studies consider workhours in the 'other job' (domestic and care work) or address reverse causality between sleep quality and how long people work. This study aimed to estimate the point at which weekly workhours harm sleep, among employed Australians aged 25-64. Using Australian data (19,453 observations from 9,826 adults assessed 2013, 2017, and 2021), a maximum likelihood instrumental variable approach modelled the influence of domestic and care hours on workhours and then the effect of workhours on sleep. We tested for a non-linear pattern and a potential tipping point or limit at which sleep quality declines. Sleep quality scores were constructed from sleep duration (hours), quality rating, medications, and problems with onset. We estimated a population tipping point of 42 workhours per week, beyond which sleep quality deteriorated. Notably, women demonstrated a lower tipping point (36h) beyond which their sleep quality deteriorated compared to men (47h), likely linked to their greater care and domestic workhours in the home. Our methods allowed us to specify the point at which weekly workhours were optimal for sleep quality and the point beyond which they become harmful. By considering unequal hours worked in care and domestic work, we were able to identify distinct gender differences in this relationship.