Ireland's hidden engine: Recipe for inequality

When we think of gender inequality our minds tend to leap to wage packets and glass ceilings. But for women and girls the gender gap may be better illustrated by the long and often dangerous daily walks to fetch water, the countless hours they spend caring for others, cooking and cleaning. All these invisible tasks traditionally belong to them but are neither counted nor valued.

On 20 January, Oxfam Ireland launched it’s annual inequality report Time to Care, highlighting the need to need to support care work, which is mostly undertaken by women, to tackle inequality.

Care work is the ‘hidden engine’ that keeps the wheels of our economies, businesses and societies turning. And it is driven by women and girls who, with little or no time to get an education, earn a decent living, be involved in their communities or have a say in how our societies are run, are trapped at the bottom of the economy.

Women and girls undertake more than three-quarters of unpaid care work in the world and make up two-thirds of the paid care workforce.

They carry out 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work every day. When valued at minimum wage this would represent a contribution to the global economy of at least $10.8 trillion a year, more than three times the size of the global tech industry.

In Ireland

Like the global situation care work (paid and unpaid) in Ireland is highly gendered and undervalued in terms of pay and recognition. Provision of care services (e.g. childcare, care for older people) by the State is relatively low, leaving households to provide these services themselves or to source them from the market, if they can pay. The levels of support for combining paid and unpaid work are still well behind the EU average, while state supports for those who wish to receive care in their own home are limited. This issue is also poorly integrated into social and economic policy deliberations. Ireland provides the least support to care work among the EU28. This sits uneasily with Ireland’s reputation as being a good place for families Thus, any cutbacks or delays in investment impact women disproportionately.

Ireland has the fifth largest number of billionaires in the world, relative to its population, the vast majority of which are men, while women in Ireland put in 38m hours of unpaid care work  every week,  adding at least €24 billion of value to the Irish economy every year. This is equivalent to 12.3% of the Irish economy.

Oxfam Ireland is asking the next Government to:

• Implement the recommendations of the citizen’s assembly on gender equality related to care work. This will require significant extra investments in public services and social infrastructure. For example, increase investment in early years education to bring overall expenditure in line with the UNICEF recommendation of 1% of GDP.
• Ensure care workers employed or funded by State programs are properly compensated to at least a living wage level.
• Hold a referendum on Art. 41. 2 of the constitution to amend the language so it is gender neutral and recognises the value of care work in Irish society.
• There is a need for integrated changes in social and employment policies that support carers, facilitate the combination of care and employment, while at the same time encourage greater male participation in care. For example, agree to more paid shared parental leave and more non-transferable paid parental leave for men. Reform the pension system to ensure that women don’t loss pension rights as a result of stepping out of the work force due to care responsibilities.
• It should be a requirement of for all Government departments to  produce a equality budgeting impact statement on a statutory basis. Ireland needs to comprehensively   adopt   gender   budgeting   approaches   that   systematically   involve women’s organizations and civil society, to provide proper scrutiny of the impact of economic and taxation policies, as well as spending priorities, on women and girls.
• The CSO should collect better data on the levels and distribution of unpaid care work on an ongoing basis and incorporate the contribution of unpaid care work into overall macroeconomic statistics. This will allow this currently hidden sector of the economy to be considered as part of future economic development planning.