Reflections on Care: Lessons from the Past, Demands for the Future

What if national economic statistics captured the value of care labor? What if caregiver earnings reflected the real value of their labor? What if the value placed on caregiving skills brought more men into care professions, helping upend gender stereotypes?  

These are no longer unrealistic possibilities. They are now becoming policy priorities—and Latin America and the Caribbean are leading the way. 

Last week, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) hosted the sixteenth session of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean at Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco in Mexico City. The central theme, Advancing a Care Society, was a bold choice. By prioritizing care, ECLAC has asserted regional leadership at a time when governments that have until recently been champions of gender equality have swung in the other direction. 

Feminist organizations around the world, including ICRW, have been calling for recognition of care work and the need for supportive policies since the 1970s. However, when the First World Conference on Women was convened at that exact location in Mexico City fifty years ago, care work barely registered on the agenda. References to care were notably absent from the conference declaration. 

Nevertheless, campaigns like Wages for Housework, launched in the mid-1970s, built on early and seminal work from feminist economists to call attention to the critical nature of unpaid and underpaid care labor in the global economy. Yet notwithstanding two decades of subsequent activism, care work only got a passing mention in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action adopted at the Fourth World Conference for Women in 1995. There is a paragraph in the declaration, under the chapter on women in the economy, that references unpaid domestic and community care work. Unsure of what to do in the absence of accurate measurement of the overall value to economies, the recommendation section simply stated that “women’s contribution to development is seriously underestimated,” and called for further research. 

It was not until 2018 that the International Labour Organization produced a rigorous global study. The Care Work and Care Jobs Report provided what had been missing—a comprehensive look at the scale and value of unpaid and paid care work across the world. This breakthrough report opened a long-overdue global policy dialogue. It was further propelled into the limelight by the COVID-19 pandemic, which moved care from invisible to indispensable virtually overnight. In 2020, the World Bank released an aptly timed report on the benefits of investing in childcare. Governments worldwide were ready for policy change to address massive economic and social dislocations and public frustration. As my former colleague Jamille Bigio and I wrote, care was finally being recognized as a public good and a part of critical social infrastructure. 

And just last week, the Interamerican Court for Human Rights issued a landmark legal victory for care advocates. In response to a request submitted by the Argentine Republic in 2023, the Court affirmed that care constitutes an autonomous human right and outlined measures that states must implement to guarantee the right to care. It’s a milestone moment that ensures care will no longer be an afterthought in national or international policy. Indeed, as we look forward to the Beijing + 30 commemoration, it’s notable that UN Women’s Action Agenda recognizes both access to care and decent work in the care sector as essential to ending poverty. 

However, we cannot take gains in care and women’s rights for granted. Even as Argentina celebrates this legal breakthrough, it faces a severe rollback of gender equality policies and funding, for example. We must constantly organize to defend and secure our victories. 

That’s why this year’s ECLAC conference matters so much. Its accompanying report asserts that “moving towards a care society will entail a paradigm shift across multiple interconnected dimensions.” The report calls for re-evaluation of all our existing models of economic development, proposing a break from the past to a new way of thinking.  

The care economy can absorb many more people if we can alter the calculus around care jobs, creating better pay and conditions to reflect the actual value of care: what we might call a feminist just transition. The ECLAC Declaration and conference outcomes give us hope that some governments may be ready to accelerate the pace and direction of policy change. It’s a smart, sustainable investment that can benefit everyone. 

We also take this call as a provocation to our team at ICRW to position our research and analysis for the 21st century economy. In Kenya, for example, we are already meeting the moment by working on gender-responsive investments at subnational levels, in line with the Government of Kenya’s devolution approach.  

Looking forward, and building on my recent work on care in the digital economy, I’m interested in: What safeguards are needed on the digital management of care itself?  How can we advance gender-responsive tax policy for the investments in care we need, given the fierce resistance to taxing digital transactions? And where are the venues to elevate interconnected concerns regarding already inequitable access to resources, and AI’s literal thirst for increasingly scarce water supplies that could otherwise benefit women and households in less prosperous regions? 

Care work is the foundation of everything—the engine that runs our society. Now is the time to recognize its importance and make the long-overdue shifts in the economics around it, not just for the present but as we look down the road to the next half century of progress toward gender equality.