International Day of Care and Support
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/10/30
Among the most relevant and important organizations for gender equality, the rights of women and girls, and the cataloguing of rights abuse against women is UN Women. They stated the importance of critical investments in gender equality.
Numerous rights documents emphasizing gender equality consistently mention the unpaid or “unremunerated” areas of work for women. When considering inequality, we should look to accepted productivity and wealth generation metrics in a society — human activity made manifest as a utility.
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Women’s unremuneratwomen work can become as much as 40 percent of the GDP in some countries. In a simplistic analysis, part of gender equality is aiming for a more even distribution of unpaid or home labour, childcare, and so on. Around the world, women and girls work more than 2.5 times as many hours per day.
What are we to make to make of these facts? Should we feel despair or do nothing? Both seem rather unproductive. Why not learn about it, take action, and see the benefits?
The full realization of men benefits the full realization of women, and vice versa. Many more disparities exist for women compared to men. However, I am not making a stereotype of victimhood since I am trying to give a statistically averaging image and then use this to provide the start for reflection on particulars. Girls and women, particularly minority and migrant women, have significant disparities in domains of low pay and unpaid work.
These can be changed.
About 80 percent of the paid domestic workers around the world are women. By this extended logic, women take part in paid domestic work more and then go home to caretaker and homecare chores than men. Naturally, it may differ for every case and should be negotiated based on temperaments and situations.
However, what can be done at the gross level of disparity to make for more equitable work? We are dealing with the right issue more than anything. Poverty can be reverse-tracked to these types of disparities.
It only seems proportional to investment in women as the collective investment is in society by default. I am not speaking to any particular woman of virtue or vice, but I am talking more about the statistical inference from the general data. More time spent on unpaid work means less time for work and income generation. This impacts lifetime earnings, increasing the chances of poverty.
Global efforts at the national level could create 300 million jobs by 2035. With the recent celebration of the International Day of Care and Support, Panama, Colombia, Chile, and Brazil passed National Care Systems established by passing laws. These can help.
UN Women said, “Kenya [used] using the data of its first national Time Use Survey to inform the development of its national care policy. We welcome the Philippines’ Caregivers Welfare Act that upholds the rights of caregivers; Spain’s approval of a strategy for a new model of long-term care in the community; and Canada’s work with provincial, territorial, and Indigenous partners to provide a high-quality, affordable, flexible, and inclusive early learning and child care system, with new investments totalling up to $30 billion over five years.”
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