Unpaid Care Work and Female Labour-Force Participation

Unpaid care work is the work of looking after people and maintaining a household without payment, including childcare, elder care, cooking and cleaning. Female labour-force participation measures the share of women in a specified population who are working or seeking or available for work. Care responsibilities can restrict women’s time and ability to enter employment, search for jobs or remain employed.

How care responsibilities constrain employment

When households assign most domestic and caregiving responsibilities to women, participation in employment becomes conditional on fitting work around those responsibilities.

• Time poverty reduces the hours available for paid work, job searches, training and travel to workplaces.
• Childbirth, childcare and care of dependent family members can interrupt employment, reducing work experience and opportunities for advancement.
• The need to remain near home can narrow job choices towards home-based, flexible or informal work, even when these offer lower earnings or weaker protection.
• Women who enter paid employment may retain their domestic responsibilities, creating a double burden that makes continued employment difficult.
• Gender norms that treat care as primarily women’s responsibility can reinforce these constraints, even where women have education and skills.

Why labour statistics need a care-work perspective

A woman outside the labour force is not necessarily doing no work. The distinction is between activities recognised as employment and unpaid services performed within the household.

• Under Periodic Labour Force Survey classifications, attending only to domestic duties does not count as employment; household caregiving therefore does not by itself place a woman in the labour force.
• Unpaid care must be distinguished from work as an unpaid helper in a household enterprise, which can count as employment.
• The Time Use Survey records time spent on unpaid domestic and caregiving services, making visible work that employment indicators alone do not capture.

Reducing the care barrier

Policy should expand women’s choices rather than merely add paid employment to an unchanged care burden.

• Affordable, accessible and reliable childcare services, including crèches, can make employment more feasible for caregivers.
• Better access to water, clean cooking energy and other basic services can reduce time spent on domestic tasks.
• Redistribution of care among women, men, public services and employers can reduce its concentration within households on women.
• Safe transport, suitable working arrangements and maternity protection can help women enter and remain in employment.
• Care-related schemes should be assessed through service quality, accessibility, hours of operation and actual use, alongside their effects on women’s time and employment.