Even as we celebrate International Women’s Day, our role in society remains undervalued

The modern-day concept of International Women’s Day – a day of activism and equality – was born out of the suffragette movement in the US. This movement transcended class, geography and time with International Women’s Day now celebrated across the world.

A battle cry of the original movement was “Give us bread, but give us roses” – an emotive call to action which spoke to the dual desires of women at the time. They wanted a living wage and fair treatment in work – things to sustain them, like bread. But they also wanted dignity in the work they did and for their contributions to be valued – the things that made life beautiful, like roses.

While women have made many strides in the 110 years since this call to action, there are still millions of women worldwide who work in care and whose contributions are chronically underappreciated and undervalued. Oxfam’s recent Time to Care report illustrated this systemic undervaluing of care work.

On a global scale, women do more than three-quarters of all unpaid care work. This equates to 42 percent of women who are not engaged in paid employment because of their caregiving responsibilities, compared to just six percent of men. Across the Middle East and North Africa, these statistics are starker, with 73 percent of women unable to engage in paid employment due to unpaid care work obligations.

These numbers reveal a huge proportion of women who are not engaged in the traditional labour market, and whose societal contributions are therefore underappreciated. To put these numbers into perspective, care work done by women and girls is worth three times more than the global tech industry and nine times more than the pharmaceutical industry.

The issue of undervalued and underpaid care is not only global, but local. In Ireland, care work is still highly gendered, with the most recent census highlighting that 98 percent of those responsible for looking after the home or family were women. Irish women’s unpaid care work contributes at least €24 billion to the economy every year.

In Northern Ireland, carers’ support is valued at £4.6 billion a year – but this comes at high personal cost. In addition to the financial cost of their caring role, carers often face loneliness and social isolation, as well as increased health problems of their own.

Carers NI recently estimated that 1 in 5 people in Northern Ireland provide care for a family member or friend, over 58,000 more than the 2011 Census records. Over half of all carers in Northern Ireland are women.

Despite the tireless contribution of women, care is consistently treated as non-work – and spending on care is seen as a cost, not an investment.

Read our submission to the Citizens’ Assembly here