In the UK, women with young children are employed for shorter hours than those without children, while for men it is the other way around.42 This matches the situation in Mexico where, in 2010, 46% of mothers of very young children were in paid employment compared to 55% of women in households without children. The figures for men were 99% and 96%, respectively. In the US, female paid employment is actually pretty high amongst younger women, but it sharply declines after motherhood, ‘which is being progressively delayed’.43
The failure to collect data on women’s unpaid workload can also stymie development efforts. Mayra Buvinic, senior fellow at the UN Foundation, points to a history of initiatives in low-income countries littered with training programmes that have failed because they ‘have been built on the mistaken assumption that women have plenty of free time, backed by limited data on women’s time-intensive work schedules’.44 Women may sign up for these programmes, but if the initiatives don’t account for women’s childcare demands, women don’t complete them. And that’s development money down the drain – and more women’s economic potential wasted. In fact, the best job-creation programme could simply be the introduction of universal childcare in every country in the world.
Of course, it’s not just childcare that affects female paid employment. Elder care also takes up significant amounts of women’s time, and demand is set to increase.45 Between 2013 and 2050, the global population aged sixty or over is projected to more than double.46 By 2020, for the first time in history, the number of people aged sixty and over will outnumber children younger than five.47 And along with getting older, the world is getting sicker. By 2014, nearly a quarter of the world’s disease burden was in people aged over sixty – most of it chronic.48 By 2030 an estimated 6 million older people in the UK (nearly 9% of the total population) will be living with a long-term illness.49 The EU has already passed this milestone: 10% of its population50 (around 50 million citizens51) are estimated to suffer from two or more chronic conditions. Most of them are sixty-five years and over.52 In the US, 80% of over-sixty-fives have at least one chronic condition, and 50% have at least two.53
All these care needs (the US has an unpaid labour force of 40 million providing care for sick and elderly relatives54) affect women’s ability to work. Female carers are almost seven times more likely than men to cut back from full-time to part-time work.55 US women aged between fifty-five and sixty-seven who care for their parents unpaid reduce their paid work hours by, on average, 41%,56 and 10% of US women caring for someone with dementia have lost job benefits.57 In the UK, 18% of women who care for someone with dementia have taken a leave of absence from work, and nearly 19% have had to quit work either to become a carer or because their care-giving duties became a priority, while 20% of female carers have gone from working full-time to part-time. This is the case for only 3% of male carers.58
If governments want to tap the GDP source of women’s increased participation in paid labour it’s clear that they have to reduce women’s unpaid work: McKinsey found that a decrease in the time British women spend doing unpaid work from five to three hours correlated with a 10% increase in their paid labour-force participation.59 As we’ve seen, introducing properly paid maternity and paternity leave is an important step to achieving this, by increasing female paid employment and potentially even helping to close the gender pay gap60 – which is in itself a boon to GDP. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research has found that if women had been paid equally in 2016, the US economy would have produced $512.6 billion more in income – which is 2.8% of 2016’s GDP, and represents ‘approximately 16 times what the federal and state governments spent in fiscal year 2015 on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families’.61
A more dramatic government intervention than the introduction of paid parental leave would be to invest in social infrastructure. The term infrastructure is generally understood to mean the physical structures that underpin the functioning of a modern society: roads, railways, water pipes, power supplies. It doesn’t tend to include the public services that similarly underpin the functioning of a modern society like child and elder care.
The Women’s Budget Group argues that it should.62 Because, like physical infrastructure, what the WBG calls social infrastructure ‘yields returns to the economy and society well into the future in the form of a better educated, healthier and better cared for population’. Arguably then, this exclusion of care services from the general concept of ‘infrastructure’ is just another unquestioned male bias in how we structure our economy.
Take early childhood education (ECE) and high-quality formal childcare including for very young toddlers and infants. Investment in these can actually reduce overall education spend because it lowers the level of investment required in remedial education.63 It also improves cognitive development, educational achievement and health outcomes64 for children (particularly socio-economically disadvantaged children).65 All of which increases productivity in the long run.66
A report on two ECE pilot studies found that by the age of forty, US children who received ECE were more likely to be employed (76% versus 62%) and to have higher median annual earnings ($20,800 versus $15,300).67 They were also more likely to own homes (37% versus 28%); a car (82% versus 60%); and to have savings accounts (76% versus 50%). ECE was also found to have wider indirect effects of a lower crime rate, resulting in lower law-enforcement costs. The report concluded that investing in ECE had a greater positive impact on long-term economic growth than business subsidies, and
