Post-Covid, findings reveal a substantial surge in women’s caregiving duties, impacting both home and paid work. Compared to men in the household, women dedicated significantly more time to unpaid care work, with women’s participation being 7.3 times that of men. Women's dedication to unpaid care work underscores a crucial gender disparity.
While the Government of India acknowledges the notion of decent work and has made commitments to promote decent work principles, including providing fair wages, safe working conditions, etc, actual implementation, particularly concerning women workers, including those engaged in domestic work, remains a challenging endeavour.
Effective realisation of commitments still faces significant hurdles like low wages, absence of social security benefits, and insufficient job protection. Addressing these critical issues demands increased attention and action from the Government.
Unpaid care work includes tasks related to caregiving, household management, and community support. It plays a pivotal role in sustaining families, nurturing children, supporting the elderly, and maintaining the overall well-being of communities.
However, traditional economic frameworks tend to overlook the economic value of women’s unpaid work.
This undervaluation can perpetuate gender wage gaps and hinder women’s financial independence, impacting their access to economic opportunities. Without the efforts of women domestic workers, who are major contributors to care work, the social fabric of our societies would be severely compromised.
The undervaluation of such work reinforces traditional gender roles, and can hinder women’s participation in paid employment and career advancement.
Unpaid work by women plays a crucial role in sustaining a healthy and productive workforce, thereby contributing to the overall functioning of the formal economy.
Failure to recognise the economic value of unpaid care work can lead to an incomplete understanding of a country’s true economic output and potential. Recognising and valuing unpaid care work are essential steps in advancing gender equality and dismantling the barriers that restrict women’s opportunities and economic empowerment.
Incorporating both paid and unpaid work into economic analyses provides a more precise comprehension of the economy’s productivity and the contributions of women.
This approach not only challenges traditional gender roles and stereotypes but also informs labour laws and regulations to ensure fair wages, decent working conditions, and social protections.
The “decent work” framework is gaining recognition as a critical factor in policy shaping. Key policy messages to address the issue of exploitation in domestic work include: Ensuring that domestic workers receive compensation at least equal to the government’s legally mandated minimum wage to combat exploitation effectively; and implementing baseline income protection.
This article analyses three aspects of unpaid care work and how it disadvantages women domestic workers in the labour market.
First, it examines the impact of the pandemic on the volume of unpaid care work performed by these women, and other challenges faced by them.
Second, analysing their time-distribution on house work and care activities, it looks at their labour through the “decent work” framework to determine if they received fair wages.
And third, it discusses the significance of making unpaid care work visible, which gets reinforced by the insights emerging from the interactions.
Interviews were organised with a set of thirty women domestic workers from the Sanwal Nagar area of South Delhi, through pre-designed questionnaires.
The aim was to get insights about their everyday routine, and how women from different categories of households — nuclear families and extended families (including grandparents, aunts, uncles) spent their time over a 24-hour period.
All of them did domestic work in their own households, and also went to do house work at other houses, so the interview process also included questions about wages received by them in return for working in other houses.
To understand the challenges in their lives after the advent of pandemic, and coping mechanisms, additional contextual information was captured on issues like: Sexual division of labour within households, working conditions faced by workers, wages per month.
So, the interactions were not focused solely on data collection, but also tried to comprehend additional benefits or discrimination faced by the workers. Men in their households were also asked to share their time allocation on domestic unpaid duties.
Findings are organised around the three points mentioned earlier: Pandemic disrupted the daily routine of domestic workers. Echoing the overall rise in women’s household workloads during the pandemic, the survey showed that female domestic workers faced greater impacts.
Their caregiving responsibilities surged not just within their homes, but also extended to their paid workplaces. This meant that the average hours spent on domestic work post-lockdown went up for them. Compared to men in the household, women dedicated significantly more time to unpaid care work, with women’s participation being 7.3 times that of men.
(The author is a student of economics. She penned this write-up as part of her work on a research project on Unpaid Care Labour of Women.)