When New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made history in 2018 by attending a United Nations general assembly meeting with her infant daughter, she was asked by an American reporter whether it was harder to govern New Zealand or take the three-month-old baby on the 17-hour-flight to the meeting. “It felt at the time on par,” Ardern said in response.

With the global coronavirus pandemic forcing large swathes of the workforce to work from home, this comparison has become more visible than ever as many juggle paid employment with unpaid care and domestic work.

McKinsey estimates that women undertake 75% of the world’s unpaid work, worth 13% of GDP when the extent to which it subsidises the wider economy and public services is measured. Feminist scholars and campaigners have long called for this work to be valued and accounted for given the unequal burden it places on women and, consequently, the role it plays in sustaining gender inequality and pay gaps.

Could the coronavirus pandemic force governments to finally enshrine the value of this work in law and policy?

Valuing unpaid care work

For experts and campaigners, the increased visibility of unpaid work during lockdowns and stay-at-home orders is an important first step towards better policy.

Strong policy needs to challenge how care and wellbeing have traditionally been thought about

“This pandemic is indeed highlighting the value of women’s unpaid care work, which has historically been invisible, under-valued and under-paid,” said Jessica Nguyen from the European Women’s Lobby (EWL). “The EU and its member states have every opportunity to draw from the lessons learned from this crisis, particularly when recognising women’s invaluable work to society and rethinking “equal work for equal value,” a principle in European law which refers to different types of work deemed of the same value to society being remunerated equally to one another.

Professor Nancy Folbre, who specialises in the economics of care at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, echoes this sentiment. She pointed to how the value of domestic work is becoming more apparent to men because they are undertaking more household chores during the lockdown.

Some governments have been quick to respond to care work’s recent high profile status, putting in place policies that experts say are a good start for increasing the value of care beyond the pandemic. In Europe, the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy and Belgium have each introduced paid parental leave for those taking on caring responsibilities during the outbreak.

The best responses are those that deal directly with the experiences of women and girls and apply a gender lens to policy making, said Nguyen. For example, gender budgeting helps assess economic decisions for their impacts on women and using sex-aggregated data to inform policy can highlight its specific gendered impacts.

Beyond the pandemic, this means the changes that would be most effective are often large in scale, requiring a shift in attitude as well as policy.

Strong policy needs to challenge how care and wellbeing have traditionally been thought about, said Nguyen. She gives New Zealand’s 2019 Wellbeing Budget as one good example of an evidence-based approach to the economy, that recognises the economic benefits of prioritising issues such as mental health, child poverty and domestic violence as well as caregiving. Rather than focusing on short-term economic outputs, the budget instead includes five measures based on quality of life.

There are many different kinds of policy required to address the issue, said Professor Folbre, highlighting the need to discourage long working weeks and to provide high-quality and flexible childcare at no or subsidised cost.

A guaranteed universal basic income scheme of the type floated by a number of governments in response to the pandemic could also be helpful, she said, but only if it is provided to children at the same level as to adults, such as in the Alaskan state model which has paid out a universal annual lump sum to every adult and child in the state since 1982.

"There is already a lot of momentum toward recognising and trying to approximate the market value of unpaid work”

While such measures may traditionally have been considered too radical or expensive, a new political landscape formed out of the pandemic could present an opportunity for fundamental change.

Leveraging existing opportunities

With the pandemic so dramatically altering the backdrop to policymaking, the EWL are hopeful that existing opportunities to move towards a “care economy” will be seized.

The European Commission is due to put forward a legislative proposal on pay transparency by the end of 2020, which they hope will revise the concept of “equal value” in Europe. And with negotiations of the EU’s economic recovery plan ongoing, the EWL continue to lobby for a “Care Deal For Europe which would promote investment in care infrastructure, rebalance work and care responsibilities between women and men and fill thousands of jobs in the health and care sector.

Professor Folbre is also optimistic about the possibility of a post-coronavirus revaluing of unpaid care work, noting that “there is already a lot of momentum toward recognising and trying to approximate the market value of unpaid work.” Having worked in the field for thirty years, she pointed to a marked uptick in discussion within the last five years.

Ultimately, experts say, the pandemic has highlighted to society-at-large what they have long known to be true.

It may be too early to say what the long-term impacts will be, said Nguyen, but it has shown the world how valuable unpaid care work is to society and the economy.

“Women are the backbone of our society,” she said. “It is women that enable it to continue functioning.” — Eve Livingston

(Picture credit: Unsplash)