unpaid care work

The Covid-19 pandemic and resulting closure of South Sudan’s schools in March 2020 exacerbated many of the challenges female learners face in pursuing an education. Research conducted for this paper found that increased poverty, domestic care work, early and forced marriage, and teenage pregnancy would make it difficult for female learners to return to schools when they reopened in May 2021.

A year after WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, the virus has laid bare the stark gender inequality that continues to shape our world. Despite being at the forefront of the response, women have borne the brunt of this crisis. On International Women's Day, we must reflect on why this happened and why it is absolutely critical for women and girls to have an equal voice and co-lead in rebuilding after COVID-19.

New research by Oxfam and partners reveals that while COVID-19 and the related containment efforts have caused increases in women’s – and men’s – unpaid care workloads, women are still doing the bulk of this work. Care work is essential to the healthy functioning of our societies and economies. It must be at the heart of a feminist COVID-19 recovery.

Forty-three percent of women surveyed across five countries reported feeling more anxious, depressed, isolated, overworked, or ill because they are having to shoulder even more unpaid care work as a result of the coronavirus crisis, said Oxfam today. 

Across Africa, ambitions to achieve inclusive and sustainable development are being undermined by inadequate investment in the care economy. Women and girls are providing millions of hours of unpaid care and domestic work – a provision which props up the economy and underpins society, yet remains under-recognized, undervalued and under-invested in. 

The world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population, reveals a new report from Oxfam today ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.

Economic inequality is based on a flawed and sexist economic system that values the wealth of the privileged few, mostly men, more than the billions of hours of the most essential work – the unpaid and underpaid care work done primarily by women and girls around the world. This has to change.

Women and girls work incredibly hard to care for others. Not only is this work unpaid, but it's often not seen as real work at all. If we valued care work the same as other work, it would be worth nearly $11 trillion US dollars a year. But its true value is much greater. To fight inequality and beat poverty, we must make care count.

Women in developing countries can spend up to 14 hours per day doing essential care work because they lack of the kind of time-saving infrastructure many of us take for granted. Not all tasks can be reduced or eliminated, but some can, and doing so would free the hands of women and girls to work, to study and to contribute to their communities.

The report seeks to demonstrate the gendered implications of how tax systems are designed, focusing on identifying aspects of taxation that can damage women's economic autonomy. It also offers recommendations for transforming tax policy as an instrument to help combat some of the inequalities affecting women.