Gender, family and care provision in developing countries:Towards gender equality

Abstract

This article describes the way in which the scientific literature approaches the issue of gender and care in developing countries, and also examines some of the main analytical trends which have contributed to this debate. The analysis of the documentation published on this subject is far from exhaustive. These works are also partially biased, and tend to base their analyses of care from a gender perspective in developing countries on certain conceptual and theoretical works on care which take as their point of reference the capitalist economies in developed countries. The analysis presented in this article therefore endeavours to go beyond economicist interpretations of development by introducing the gender perspective, and seeks to quantify unpaid care work in relation to gender equality. The aim of this research work is to contribute empirical evidence on the reproduction of gender inequality in the context of developing countries in the light of feminist theories by going beyond economicist approaches to economic and social development. The analysis essentially involves measuring the amount of paid and unpaid work done by women as compared to men using secondary data from different statistical sources compiled by the project carried out by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) on Political and Social Economy of Care. Thus, the basic objective of this work is to provide empirical evidence to highlight the importance of care in achieving gender equality, by developing social and gender policies designed to neutralise these inequalities and thereby to advance the construction of a social and democratic citizenship with no gender distinctions, in the context of developing countries.