WUNRN
UNRISD - United Nations Research
Institute for Social
Development
Author(s):
Shahra
Razavi
Programme Area: Gender
and Development
Paper No.: 3
Code: PP-GD-3
Project Title: Political
and Social Economy of Care
No. of Pages: 49
Care (whether paid or unpaid) is crucial to human well-being and to the pattern
of economic development. Some analysts emphasize the significance of care for
economic dynamism and growth. Others see care in much larger terms, as part of
the fabric of society and integral to social development. Citizenship rights,
the latter argue, have omitted the need to receive and to give care. To
overcome the gender bias that is deeply entrenched in systems of social
protection and to make citizenship truly inclusive, care must become a
dimension of citizenship with rights that are equal to those that are attached
to employment.
How problems of care are addressed by society has important implications for
the achievement of gender equality, by either broadening the capabilities and
choices of women and men, or confining women to traditional roles associated
with femininity and motherhood. How care is addressed is at the same time
inextricably intertwined with other structures of inequality, especially race
and social class. Historically and across a diverse range of countries, women
from disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups have tended to provide care services
to meet the needs of the more powerful social groups, while their own needs for
care have been downplayed and neglected. Analyses of care that falsely
homogenize women’s interests are thus deeply problematic.
This paper traces the evolution of ideas in the area of gender and care, and
analyses some of the main strands of thinking that have contributed to this
ongoing debate. The effort to review the literature is far from exhaustive, and
it is also biased toward connecting gender analyses of care in developing
countries to some of the conceptual and theoretical work on care that, for the
most part, takes the developed capitalist economies as its point of reference.
The first section analyses the contribution of feminist economics to the
conceptualization, as well as the measurement and valuation, of the unpaid
economy, including its care components. There have been important debates
within feminist economics on how to conceptualize the connections between the
sphere of market-based capital accumulation (the commodity economy), on the one
hand, and that of non-market-based social reproduction (the unpaid care
economy), on the other, while giving full recognition to the real divisions and
differences between them. This has drawn attention to the distinctions between
different components that constitute the unpaid economy, throwing the spotlight
on care and its distinct characteristics (the difficulty of raising
productivity and the associated “cost disease”). The economic dynamics of the
paid care sectors—a growing component of the gross domestic product (GDP) in
the more developed economies and also a significant employer, particularly of
women—are receiving increasing attention, particularly the tendency for market
provision to turn to low-wage and high-turnover labour strategies that produce
low-quality care services. This literature draws attention to the urgent need
for an economic strategy, underpinned by better organization and broader
coalitions among care workers, if caring standards are not to deteriorate and
care workers are not to fall further behind other workers in pay and working
conditions.
Approaching the issue of care from their distinct disciplinary perspectives in
social policy and sociology, gender analyses of welfare regimes have contributed
to the theorization of care in important ways, some of which intersects with
the work of feminist economists. The strengths of this literature, which is
reviewed in section 2 of the paper, have included its comparative dimension,
based on regime analysis, and its interrogation of a wide range of care-related
policies within a comparative framework. While much of this literature is based
on the institutionalized welfare states of the advanced capitalist economies,
the comparative and institutional frameworks proposed nevertheless provide
useful conceptual building blocks for thinking about care in other contexts.
The institutions involved in the provision of care may be conceptualized in a
stylized fashion as a care diamond, to include the family/household, markets,
the public sector and the not-for-profit sector (including voluntary and
community provision). The boundaries of the responsibility mix often shift in
response to the claims of social networks and organized interest groups (for
example, trade unions and women’s groups) as well as through state action. The
notion that countries often move back and forth across different sectors is
important because it belies the view, deeply entrenched in the modernization
narrative, of a linear path along which all countries move with an inevitable
shift from “private” (family and voluntary) provision of care to “public”
provision (by the state and market).
It is sometimes (wrongly) assumed that if issues of care were to be taken up by
policy makers, then the only possible response would be to provide some kind of
cash payment for women (for example, wages for housework or mothers’ pensions).
While this kind of demand may have been voiced historically by some women’s
rights advocates, it is not the kind of social provision that most modern-day
advocates of women’s rights prioritize. Ideally, society should recognize and
value the importance of different forms of care, but without reinforcing care
work as something that only women can or should do, given the well-known and
adverse consequences of such gendering: women’s financial precariousness and
their exclusion from the public domain.
There is enormous diversity in currently existing policy responses to
care—arguably greater than that found for other contingencies such as illness
or unemployment, and with differing implications for gender equality. Gender
advocates have put forward a range of proposals that attempt to overcome the
many disadvantages endured by most women because of their responsibilities for caregiving,
and sometimes to entice men to contribute more time to it. There are tensions,
however, between the different proposals that have been put forward in terms of
a wish to support and value care and to liberate women from the confines of
caregiving so as to enable their more active presence in the public sphere.
There is a wide range of possible policy interventions: cash payments in the
form of caregivers’ allowance or citizen’s wage (more gender-neutral than a
mothers’ pension); taxation allowances; different types of paid and unpaid
leave from employment; social security credits and social services. Some of
these are discussed in this paper. The analysis provided by feminist social
policy researchers of the outcomes of these diverse provisions in countries
where they have been put in place provides useful lessons for “latecomers” in
the area of care policy.
The final section of the paper considers the renewed interest in social policy,
trailing after the high neoliberalism of the 1980s that was epitomized by the
“social investment state” allegedly focused on productive and active welfare,
and on investing in children’s opportunities. It asks what the implications of
these ideas might be for the redesign of social policy, what space is likely to
be given to issues of care and whether gender equality and women’s movements’
claims for services and supports are likely to be accommodated in this new
welfare vision.
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