Unpaid care work takes heavy toll on women

On May 22, 2023, the State Department of Gender and Affirmative Action and UN Women convened a workshop to draft the National Unpaid Care Work Policy.

This is a welcome reaction to long-standing advocacy and responds to Sustainable Development Goal 5, which requires state parties to “recognise and value unpaid care and domestic work, provide the necessary infrastructure, and promote shared responsibilities in households”.

Unpaid care work refers to activities performed by family members for the benefit of the household and community but which are not remunerated.

Also called reproductive activities, they include: cooking; laundry; fetching water and fuel; kitchen gardening; sanitation and hygiene; care for children, the elderly and invalids; and waiting on guests.

This work is primarily done by women. If the woman in the house is not available to do it, someone else (often another woman), is hired for it. The irony is obvious, that when hired out, it is financially rewarded.

Due to its recurrent nature, the work consumes a lot of time and is physically, emotionally and psychologically demanding.

Those who carry it out incur an opportunity cost of not competing for external jobs or sacrificing promising careers, especially those that require travel, late working hours and absence from home.

A report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) highlights that unpaid care work prevents women from joining, remaining in and progressing in the labour force. Men who reported a similar bottleneck were 10 times fewer.

The opportunity cost is also evident in education. Pulling girls out of school to do domestic work denies them the right to education and its benefits, limits their personal development and even determines the lifestyles their own children will lead.

The cost is also clear in the fact that even when women and girls are ostensibly resting, it is common to find them still doing something – like crocheting, hairdressing, sorting vegetables, or minding a child.

In gender circles, this is summarised in a picture of a woman with a baby strapped on her back, balancing a bucket of water on the head, with a basket of shopping on one hand and ferrying a bundle of firewood on the other.

'Women's work never done'

This multiplicity of tasks leads to the idea of elasticity of women’s time and the phrase that “women’s work is never done”.

The unpaid care responsibilities are undervalued and not recognised as “work”. A common cartoon in the gender discourse depicts an encounter between a researcher and a woman. When asked whether she works, the woman answers in the negative.

But when asked to state her activities from morning to evening, the list is endless. So the researcher wonders why the woman says that she does not work!

Care work exposes the actors to hazards. It exposes them to waste, contaminated materials, chemicals, burns, smoke, secondary infection and risks of slipping and sustaining injuries.

Tasks such as hauling heavy loads on the head and back lead to physical strain, discomfort and negative life-long effects. For example, it contributes to miscarriage, fallen wombs (prolapse) and spinal injuries.

In Kenya, most women cannot afford technological aids such as washing machines, fridges, microwave ovens, baby carrying trolleys and cooking gas, to reduce workload.

Unpaid care work was formally recognised by statisticians at the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians in 2013. Unicef Kenya Country pioneered on this through a gender workload survey in the mid-1990s.

A more recent exercise is the time use survey conducted by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics in 2021 but whose results have yet to be released.

The Matrimonial Property Act, 2014, mandates that during dissolution of marriage, unpaid care work should be recognised as contribution to the acquisition and development of assets, and used to determine one’s share of the property.

The primary framework for addressing unpaid care work is ILO’s 5R Framework for Decent Care Work, which has been adopted by UN Women’s in the 2022 publication A Toolkit on Paid and Unpaid Care Work: From 3Rs to 5Rs. But what are the Rs?

Recognising the work implies assigning it an economic value. It is estimated that if unpaid care work were assigned the same value as wage employment, it would constitute 10 per cent of global economic output.

Reducing the burden requires investment in technology and infrastructure in sectors such as water and sanitation, energy and transport.

Redistribution focuses on getting more men and boys to share in the work. Rewarding the work means remunerating it directly or otherwise, through child grants, paid maternity leave and subsidies. Representing it means that it is professionalised and the actors protected, trained and unionised.

Should the policy be developed and implemented, Kenya will be the global pioneer in doing so.

The writer is an international gender and development consultant and scholar ([email protected]).