Women put in 3.26 billion hours of unpaid care work globally: Report

Women and

girls

put in 3.26 billion

hours

of unpaid care

work

a day—a contribution to the Indian economy of at least Rs 19 lakh crore a year. This is about 20 times the entire education budget of India in 2019 (Rs 93,000 crore), says a new report.

Oxfam’s report ‘Time to Care’ finds that

economies

are fueling the

inequality

crisis —enabling a wealthy elite to accumulate vast fortunes at the expense of ordinary people and particularly poor women and girls. The NGO’s Inequality report revealed that the top 1% of Indians hold more than 4 times the amount of

wealth

held by 953 million people (or the bottom 70% of the population). It would take a female domestic worker 22,277 years to earn a top CEO of a tech company, makes in one year.

Global inequality is shockingly entrenched and vast and the number of billionaires has doubled in the last decade, despite their combined wealth having declined just in the last year. “The gap between rich and poor can't be resolved without deliberate inequality-busting policies, and too few governments are committed to these,” Amitabh Behar, Oxfam India CEO said.

“Women and girls are among those who benefit the least from today’s economic system. They spend billions of hours cooking, cleaning and caring for children and the elderly. Unpaid care work is the ‘hidden engine’ that keeps the wheels of our economies, businesses and societies moving. It is driven by women who often have little time to get an education, earn a decent living or have a say in how our societies are run, and who are therefore trapped at the bottom of the economy,” added Behar. Women do more than three-quarters of all unpaid care work. They often have to work reduced hours or drop out of the workforce because of their care workload. Across the globe, 42% per cent of women cannot get jobs because they are responsible for all the caregiving, compared to just six per cent of men.

Women also make up two-thirds of the paid ‘care workforce’. Jobs such as nursery workers, domestic workers, and care assistants are often poorly paid, provide scant benefits, impose irregular hours, and can take a physical and emotional toll. The pressure on caregivers, both unpaid and paid, is set to grow in the coming decade as the global population grows and age.