The Complex Relationship Between Paid Work and Unpaid Care Work in Women’s Lives

Every morning across India, millions of women begin their day long before sunrise, lighting stoves, fetching water, packing tiffins, and preparing children for school. Many of them will also leave for paid jobs in fields, factories, offices, or homes of others. What follows is a working day that does not end at sunset. This invisible, unmeasured labour sits at the heart of an old feminist debate: how does capitalist accumulation depend on women’s unpaid care, and what happens when policy makers treat that care as a free, infinite resource? Feminist economists have spent decades unpacking this question, and their answers are sharper, more uncomfortable, and more relevant than ever.

The two kinds of work that hold up the economy
What counts as unpaid care work
Paid work versus unpaid care work: a deeply uneven split
Time poverty and its consequences
Caste, class, and the differentiated burden
Accumulation and the feminist critique
The “feminisation of obligation”
Economic crises and the intensification of women’s labour
Distress employment and the unpaid helper
Structural adjustment and the privatisation of care
How the burden gets transferred
The Indian experience after 1991
What feminist economists demand: the 3-R framework
Why this debate matters now

The two kinds of work that hold up the economy

Mainstream economics has long counted only one kind of labour as “productive” – the kind that earns a wage or produces goods for the market. Feminist economists rejected that line. They argued that social reproduction – the daily and generational work of feeding, cleaning, caring, nursing, and emotionally sustaining people – is what makes paid work possible in the first place. Without it, no worker would arrive at the office or the construction site ready to labour.

Scholars like Diane Elson and Nancy Folbre showed that capitalism quietly depends on this unpaid labour while refusing to pay for it. Folbre describes this as the neoliberal dilemma – capitalism relies on unpaid caring activities but does not want to pay for them. The household, in this view, is not a private retreat from the economy; it is an economic site where labour power is produced every single day, mostly by women.

What counts as unpaid care work

Unpaid care work includes cooking, cleaning, fetching water and fuel, childcare, elder care, nursing the sick, and emotional labour. The International Labour Organization estimates that if unpaid domestic and care work were given monetary value, it would exceed 40 percent of GDP. Yet because it produces no invoice, it remains absent from national income accounts and largely invisible in policy.

Paid work versus unpaid care work: a deeply uneven split

In India, the gap between men’s and women’s care responsibilities is one of the widest in the world. The Time Use Survey 2019, conducted by the National Statistical Office, found that Indian women spend eight times more hours on unpaid care work than men. Even more striking, this pattern barely shifts with education, marriage, or employment status. A woman with a postgraduate degree still does dramatically more household work than a man with similar qualifications.

The “double burden” is therefore not a metaphor. Women in paid employment take on roughly six times more unpaid care work than employed men. They are not exchanging one shift for another; they are stacking shifts on top of each other.

Time poverty and its consequences

This stacking produces what feminist economists call time poverty – a chronic shortage of hours for rest, study, leisure, civic participation, or self-development. The most recent Time Use Survey shows that women dedicate around 140 minutes daily to caregiving while men manage just 74 minutes, and the gap on broader domestic work has shrunk by only about ten minutes in five years. Time poverty has measurable consequences: poorer mental and physical health, lower lifetime earnings, restricted political participation, and fewer opportunities to acquire new skills.

The Oxford Industrial Law Journal puts the structural problem plainly – the poor working conditions of women are attributable to this double burden of work. Rigid gender norms combine with weak labour regulation to push women into informal, low-paid, and insecure jobs, precisely because those are the kinds of jobs that can be squeezed around endless domestic duties.

Caste, class, and the differentiated burden

The care burden is not equal among women either. Recent qualitative work shows that lower-caste women face compounded strain due to limited support and infrastructure, while upper-caste women experience emotional stress from societal expectations. Dalit, Adivasi, and Bahujan women, who often perform paid domestic work in other households on top of their own, carry a triple shift – paid care for others, unpaid care for their own families, and the social stigma attached to both.

Accumulation and the feminist critique

Why does this matter for the larger economy? Because capital accumulation – the expansion of profits and productive capacity – quietly free-rides on women’s unpaid work. Healthy, educated, emotionally stable workers don’t appear from nowhere; they are produced by years of caregiving. Diane Elson argues that if technological developments mean the private sector increasingly wants healthy, educated labour, then deep and ongoing depletion of social reproduction will hinder capital accumulation itself.

This is the feminist twist on the old Marxist debate. Where classical Marxism focused on the exploitation of wage labour, feminist political economists added a second site of exploitation: the household. Marxist feminists in the 1970s argued that women primarily serve men within the household as well as sustain the capitalist economy through their reproductive role. Care work is not outside the circuit of accumulation – it subsidises it.

The “feminisation of obligation”

Sociologist Sylvia Chant coined the term feminisation of obligation to describe how, as states pull back and markets expand, women take on more and more responsibility for keeping families afloat. They are expected to earn, to care, to absorb shocks, and to make up for whatever the state or market fails to deliver. This obligation is presented as natural, even virtuous, when it is actually a transfer of cost from public institutions onto women’s bodies and hours.

Economic crises and the intensification of women’s labour

Economic crises – pandemics, recessions, inflation surges, droughts – do not affect men and women equally. When household incomes drop, women typically do three things at once: take on more paid work (often informal and poorly paid), do more unpaid work to compensate for things the family can no longer buy, and reduce their own consumption first.

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, this was visible across India. School closures meant additional childcare and home-schooling. Healthcare disruptions meant more time nursing the sick at home. Migrant women lost paid jobs faster than men and were absorbed back into unpaid family labour. The CEDA analysis of time-use data notes that women who report work as their usual status worked over four more hours than those who did not, and spent about 100 minutes less time on leisure – a stark indicator of the double burden during normal times, which intensifies sharply during crises.

Distress employment and the unpaid helper

One troubling pattern in recent Indian labour data is the rise in women working as “unpaid helpers” in family enterprises. Much of the recent increase in rural female labour force participation is accounted for by rising self-employment, particularly in the category of unpaid helpers in own enterprises, indicating rural distress. In other words, when households are squeezed, women are pulled into more visible “work” – but it is work that often pays them nothing directly.

Structural adjustment and the privatisation of care

The most dramatic example of how policy can intensify women’s care burden is the era of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). From the 1980s onwards, the IMF and World Bank pushed indebted countries to cut public spending, privatise services, devalue currencies, and open up to global markets. India’s own 1991 liberalisation drew partly on this template.

Feminist economists tracked the consequences carefully. Feminist economists such as Elson documented how structural adjustment policies added to women’s unpaid care work, even as they were being pushed into precarious jobs in the informal sector. When the state stops subsidising healthcare, food, water, education, or fuel, those costs do not disappear; they are absorbed by the household – and within the household, by women.

How the burden gets transferred

Three mechanisms recur across countries that underwent structural adjustment. First, cuts to public health and education force families to either pay privately or do without. Women fill the gap by nursing the sick at home, walking children to distant schools, or skipping their own treatment. Second, removal of food and fuel subsidies raises household costs, forcing women to spend more hours on shopping, cooking from scratch, gathering firewood, or queueing for cheaper goods. Third, public-sector job cuts hit women harder, since the public sector often provided some of the most secure, gender-friendly employment available.

The Bretton Woods Project notes the global pattern bluntly – SAPs and austerity measures have resulted in cuts to social safety nets and social welfare programs, perpetuating structural violence and further impoverishing women and their families. Health outcomes, in particular, deteriorate in ways that disproportionately affect women’s reproductive health.

The Indian experience after 1991

Post-liberalisation India shows similar patterns in muted form. Public investment in care infrastructure – anganwadis, primary health centres, public schools – has remained chronically underfunded. The growth of private healthcare and education has shifted costs onto households. Female labour force participation declined for many years even as the economy grew, partly because women were either pushed out of jobs that no longer fit their care responsibilities or kept out by rising household demands. Economists writing for ThePrint argue that recognising, reducing, and redistributing care work is not solely a matter of social policy; it constitutes an economic imperative.

What feminist economists demand: the 3-R framework

The dominant policy response proposed by feminist economists is the 3-R framework: Recognition, Reduction, and Redistribution of unpaid care work.

Recognition means making care visible – through time-use surveys, satellite national accounts, and public acknowledgement that care is real work. Reduction means investing in infrastructure that cuts the drudgery: piped water, clean cooking fuel, electricity, sanitation, childcare centres, elder care services, and public transport. Redistribution means sharing care more equally – between men and women within households, and between households and the state through public services and social protection.

Some feminist economists, including Nancy Folbre, add a fourth R for Reward – fair pay and protections for paid care workers, who are themselves overwhelmingly women, often from marginalised communities, and chronically underpaid.

Why this debate matters now

India is aiming for sustained high growth and demographic dividend. Both depend on healthy, educated, productive citizens. Both depend, in turn, on the unpaid and underpaid labour of women. Treating that labour as a free, infinite resource is not just unjust; it is economically short-sighted. When women are exhausted, ill, undereducated, or excluded from paid work, the long-term capacity of the economy itself is undermined.

The feminist discourse on accumulation, paid work, and unpaid care work is therefore not a niche academic concern. It is a structural critique of how we measure value, design policy, and define the economy. Until care is counted, redistributed, and supported, growth statistics will continue to hide the labour of half the population.

What do you think? If unpaid care work were assigned a monetary value and included in GDP, how would that change the way governments design budgets and social policies? And in your own household or community, who carries most of the care work – and what would it take to redistribute it more fairly?

References

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The Complex Relationship Between Paid Work and Unpaid Care Work in Women’s Lives

Table of Contents

The two kinds of work that hold up the economy 🔗

What counts as unpaid care work 🔗

Paid work versus unpaid care work: a deeply uneven split 🔗

Time poverty and its consequences 🔗

Caste, class, and the differentiated burden 🔗

Accumulation and the feminist critique 🔗

The “feminisation of obligation” 🔗

Economic crises and the intensification of women’s labour 🔗

Distress employment and the unpaid helper 🔗

Structural adjustment and the privatisation of care 🔗

How the burden gets transferred 🔗

The Indian experience after 1991 🔗

What feminist economists demand: the 3-R framework 🔗

Why this debate matters now 🔗