Opening the book…
The Work the World Needs and the Work the World Counts
Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\) is an infographic titled “The Economy Has a Gender.” It illustrates the relationship between the visible paid economy and the less visible care work that supports it. At the top of the image is a large platform labeled “Paid Economy.” The platform contains illustrations representing offices, hospitals, schools, factories, shops, and service work. These activities represent employment and economic activity that are typically counted in formal economic statistics. The paid economy is shown resting on a larger foundation labeled “Care Work.” This supporting layer includes six forms of work: childcare, eldercare, cooking, cleaning, emotional labor, and household management. Illustrations show people caring for children and older adults, preparing food, cleaning a home, providing emotional support, and managing household responsibilities. Text beneath the foundation states: “The paid economy depends on care work.” A note beside the illustration explains that much of this care work is unpaid or underpaid and is disproportionately performed by women. The arrangement of the image emphasizes that formal economic activity depends on care labor even when that labor is not fully recognized or compensated by markets. The lower portion of the infographic is titled “Global Care Chains.” It shows a woman leaving her home country to work as a caregiver abroad. At home, responsibility for children or other family members is transferred to another woman or family member. The migrant worker travels internationally and provides care for another household, represented by an illustration of her assisting an older person. An arrow labeled “Remittances Home” shows money flowing from the migrant worker back to her household or community of origin. The visual therefore illustrates how paid care in one household can depend on the reorganization of unpaid or underpaid care in another household, sometimes across national borders. At the bottom, the infographic concludes with the statement: “The work the world needs is not always the work the world counts.”
Here is one of the stranger features of the global economy.
Every day, billions of hours of economically essential work are performed without appearing on a paycheck.
Children are fed. Elderly relatives are bathed. Homes are cleaned. Food is prepared. Water is collected. Family members are transported to medical appointments. Emotional crises are managed. School schedules are coordinated. Sick relatives are cared for.
Now remove that labor for a week.
Good luck running the economy.
Yet much of this activity sits outside conventional measures of economic production, and women perform a disproportionate share of it. UN Women reports that women and girls globally devote about 2.5 times as many hours per day to unpaid domestic and care work as men.
That statistic looks like a household statistic.
It is actually a globalization statistic.
The Shift After the Shift
Suppose two people finish an eight-hour paid workday at the same time. One goes home and begins several additional hours of cooking, cleaning, childcare, or eldercare. The other does considerably less.
Their official workday may look identical.
Their actual workday is not.
Feminist economists have long criticized economic models that treat households as private spaces outside the “real” economy. Scholars including Lourdes Benería, Günseli Berik, and Maria Floro argue that globalization cannot be understood without examining how paid production depends on unpaid reproductive and care labor (Benería, Berik, & Floro, 2015).
This relationship becomes especially visible in what scholars call global care chains.
A woman from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Moldova, or another migrant-sending society may leave her own family to provide childcare or eldercare for a wealthier household abroad. Her wages may support children and relatives at home, while another family member, often another woman, takes on the care work she previously performed.
One household solves a care shortage by importing someone else's labor.
The labor crosses borders.
The need for care does not disappear. It moves.
Why Are Some Jobs “Women's Work”?
Global labor markets also divide occupations by gender.
Garment manufacturing has historically relied heavily on women workers. Nursing and care sectors are feminized in many countries. Domestic work remains disproportionately performed by women. Men dominate numerous construction, transportation, extraction, and military occupations.
These patterns do not arise because women mysteriously possess garment-factory DNA while men inherit forklift chromosomes.
They are produced through social expectations, education, employer preferences, discrimination, immigration policy, wage structures, and histories of industrial development.
Employers have sometimes actively recruited women into export-processing industries because they were stereotyped as patient, obedient, dexterous, or less likely to organize. Those assumptions may appear cultural, but they can have very profitable economic consequences.
Gender norms can therefore become business models.
The Double Burden
When women enter paid employment without a corresponding redistribution of household labor, economists and sociologists often describe the result as a double burden: paid work layered on top of unpaid domestic responsibilities.
The phrase is useful, but the phenomenon has larger consequences than simple exhaustion.
Time itself becomes a resource.
A person spending several additional hours each day on unpaid care has fewer hours available for paid employment, education, political participation, networking, rest, entrepreneurship, or leisure. Over decades, those lost hours can translate into differences in earnings, promotions, pensions, wealth accumulation, and political influence.
Inequality can accumulate quietly.
Not through one spectacular discriminatory act, but through thousands of ordinary days.
When “Empowerment” Meets the Market
Development organizations have spent decades promoting women's entrepreneurship, cooperatives, microfinance, vocational training, financial inclusion, and access to credit. Some of these efforts have produced meaningful gains, particularly where women previously lacked independent access to financial resources.
The original Chapter 8 featured examples of women's cooperatives and entrepreneurial initiatives as routes toward greater economic autonomy.
But we should ask a harder question.
What exactly is being transformed?
Imagine a woman receives a microloan, starts a small business, earns additional income, and gains greater financial influence within her household. That can matter enormously.
Now imagine that she remains responsible for nearly all childcare, has no affordable healthcare, lacks legal title to property, faces harassment in the marketplace, cannot access formal credit, and works within an economy offering few secure jobs.
She may have become more economically active without the underlying structure becoming particularly equal.
That does not make entrepreneurship meaningless.
It means individual resilience and structural transformation are not the same thing.
The world's women do not simply need better instructions for navigating inequality.
Sometimes the road needs rebuilding.
This page titled 8.2: The Economy Has a Gender was last modified on Fri, 11 Sep 2026 22:51:32 GMT and is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Miloni Gandhi.
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