Gender, Work and the Value of Care

Waring (2003) — on invisibility as a producer

"If you are invisible as a producer in a nation's economy, you are invisible in the distribution of benefits (unless they label you a welfare 'problem' or 'burden')." Source: Waring (2003), 'Counting for Something!', Gender & Development 11(1).

Mies (1998, pp.31 & 33) — the housewife as capital's foundation and colony

p.31: "The housewife and her labour…constitute the very foundation upon which this process can get started." p.33: Housework's exclusion "opened our eyes to the analysis of other such colonies of non-wage-labour exploitation, particularly the work of small peasants and women in Third World countries."

Mies (1981) — housewifisation and invisibility

"The social definition of women as housewives is a necessary precondition for the unlimited exploitation of their labour." Narsapur: 150,000–200,000 lace-makers "were nowhere to be found in the census statistics. For the census enumerators only the male head of the household counts."

Mies (2014, introduction) — women, nature, and colonies as preconditions

"The subordination and exploitation of women, nature and colonies are the precondition for the continuation of this model [of capitalist accumulation]."

Mies (2014) — women as 'optimal labour force'

"Women are the optimal labour force because they are now being universally defined as 'housewives', not as workers; this means their work…is obscured…and can hence be bought at a much cheaper price than male labour."

Mies (2014) — sex tourism as the 'most blatant manifestation' of the new IDL

"The most blatant manifestation of the combination of the new IDL with the neo-patriarchal or sexist division of labour is sex-tourism." The industry "was first planned and supported by the World Bank, the IMF and US AID." Malaysian government ad (quoted by Mies): "Who could be better qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a bench-assembly production line than the oriental girl?"

Federici (1975) — Wages Against Housework

"They say it is love, we say it is unwaged work." Demanding wages means "to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us."

Folbre — self-interest and the labour paradox

"The single-minded pursuit of self interest is pretty much a recipe for extinction." "Everything is produced by labour…except labour!"

Folbre (2024, JEP) — replacement cost vs opportunity cost

Replacement cost: "What would it cost to hire someone to provide service of the same quality?" Opportunity cost: "What am I giving up by engaging in this activity? The answer is often based on forgone earnings." Source: Folbre (2024), Care Provision and the Boundaries of Production, JEP 38(1).

Floro (2019) — not merely 'adding women and stir'

Not merely "adding women and stir" — must: (1) understand patriarchal power; (2) acknowledge intersectionality; (3) adopt a broader economy including unpaid labour; (4) emphasise care over market growth. Source: Floro (2019), Palgrave Handbook of Development Economics.

Sen (1995), cited in Benería & Sen (2021) — women at the crossroads

"Women stand at the crossroads between production and reproduction, between economic activity and the care of human beings…those most responsible and therefore with most at stake."

Ehrenreich & Hochschild (2002) — the global transfer of services

"The lifestyles of the First World are made possible by a global transfer of the services associated with a wife's traditional role — child care, homemaking, and sex — from poor countries to rich ones." Poor countries take on "the role of the traditional woman within the family — patient, nurturing, and self-denying."

Ehrenreich & Hochschild (2002) — Josephine and the extraction of love

"The wealthy countries also seek to extract something harder to measure and quantify, something that can look very much like love." "Josephine can either live with her children in desperate poverty or make money by living apart from them. Unlike her affluent First World employers, she cannot both live with her family and support it."

Ehrenreich & Hochschild (2002) — the second shift, racialised desire, and 'gone global'

"The presence of immigrant nannies enables affluent men to continue avoiding the second shift." Immigrant women desired because "they are thought to embody the traditional feminine qualities of nurturance, docility, and eagerness to please." "A division of labor feminists critiqued when it was 'local' has now, metaphorically speaking, gone global."

Criado-Perez (2019) — global distribution of unpaid work

"75% of unpaid work is done by women, who spend between three and six hours per day on it compared to men's average of thirty minutes to two hours." McKinsey: women's unpaid care = $10 trillion to annual global GDP. Source: Criado-Perez (2019), Invisible Women.

'Economy' — etymology, Adam Smith, Pigou

Greek: oikos (house) + nemein (manage). Adam Smith erased his mother cooking his dinner. Pigou: "If a man marries his housekeeper, the national dividend is diminished" — GDP counts only market exchange.

What does GDP measure and exclude?

Monetary value of goods/services for sale. Excludes unpaid household and care activities — rendering the labour that sustains the economy invisible.

What is housewifisation (Mies)?

Women defined as 'housewives/dependents' rather than workers → obscures productive labour, enables cheapened extraction, prevents organisation. Not a by-product of capitalism — its precondition.

What are 'homo economicus' and the 'mushroom man'?

Homo economicus: self-interested, rational, autonomous. Mushroom man (Folbre/Rojas): "springs into optimised behaviour as an adult, does not care for nor is cared for by anyone." Both erase reproductive labour entirely.

What is the care deficit and global care chains?

Women's rising employment in Global North + men not compensating = structural care deficit. Pulls migrant women from Global South into paid domestic/care work. Parreñas: "three-tier transfer of reproductive labour." SDL redistributed globally, not dissolved.

Time-use surveys and satellite accounts — what are they?

TUS: measure time across paid/unpaid work and leisure. Satellite accounts: translate into GDP-equivalent values. Key feminist tools; formalised in ILO 2013 redefinition of work.

ILO 2013 (19th ICLS) — redefinition of work

Work = "any activity performed by persons of any sex and age to produce goods or to provide services for use by others or for own use." Previously only work "for pay or profit" counted (1954).

Hartmann (1981) — the family as a 'locus of struggle'

Challenges the family as a "unit of solidarity" — instead a "locus of struggle": ongoing conflict over resources, labour, and power along gender lines.

Productive vs reproductive labour — why does the distinction matter?

Productive: paid, market-based, counted in GDP. Reproductive: unpaid care sustaining workers — excluded. Floro: "There is more to the reproduction of the labor force than just 'having babies.'" The distinction is politically produced, not natural.

WID, WAD, GAD — what are they?

WID (1970s): integrate women into existing development. WAD (1980s): women always active; question development itself. GAD (1985): gender roles and power dynamics more broadly — shift toward intersectionality.

UK gendered unpaid work — HETUS 2015

Women do 60% more unpaid work than men. Women do >2× men's share of cooking, childcare, housework. Only transport: men do more.

Unpaid care as share of GDP — OECD 2019

≈19% of UK GDP. Range: ~14% (Germany) → ~24% (Italy). Source: OECD (2019), Measuring Women's Economic Empowerment.

Global share of unpaid care + LAC — UNDP 2024

Women = 74% of unpaid care globally (66% in OECD). LAC: unpaid care = 21% GDP, women = ¾ of that. Source: UNDP (2024), The Missing Piece.

Daily minutes on unpaid work — Charmes (2018) / Floro (2021)

Women: avg 265 mins/day. Men: avg 83 mins/day. 64-country dataset. Source: Charmes (2018), cited in Floro (2021), Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics.

Feminist critique of orthodox development models

Focus on market output, capital formation, trickle-down → ignores unpaid reproductive labour, intra-household inequalities, gendered impacts. Women invisible until added instrumentally. (Floro 2019)

Feminist critique of heterodox/dependency models

Despite highlighting class and imperialism, still ignores patriarchy, intra-household inequality, and reproductive labour. Gender blindness reproduced in a different register. (Floro 2019; Benería & Sen 2021)

What does it mean that production and reproduction are 'co-constitutive'?

Productive sphere depends on reproductive labour replenishing the labour force at no cost to capital — each enables the other. Mies: the housewife is "the very foundation upon which this process can get started."

How do SDL and IDL structurally interlock under globalisation?

SDL assigns women reproductive/domestic/sexual labour; IDL extracts that labour from Global South women at lowest cost. Mies: older forms of SDL "were not abolished, but rather used, reinforced and reinterpreted" globally. E&H: globalisation rescales the SDL across borders — care, affect, and intimacy become transnational commodities.

UN Women's Decade (1975–1985) — what did it achieve?

Turned attention to women's invisible economic contributions. Conferences: Mexico City, Copenhagen, Nairobi. Led to ILO C189 (2011), 2030 SDGs' recognition of unpaid labour, and ILO 2013 redefinition of work.

Austerity's gendered impacts

Cuts public services → shifts care to households → increases women's unpaid work. GDP may remain stable, hiding the gendered cost. (Floro 2019; Elson 2010)

'Gender is smart economics' — what is the feminist critique?

World Bank approach treating gender equality as instrumentally useful for growth rather than inherently just. Disconnected from structural adjustment conditionalities that worsen women's position. A policy-level example of "adding women and stir."

What are the limits of Mies's concept of housewifisation?

Relies on a Western, post-WWII gender binary that flattens race, class, and cultural difference. Davis: the public/private distinction "only really works for white, middle-class women." Risks universalising a particular form of patriarchy rather than attending to its varied global manifestations.

What is social reproduction theory (SRT)?

A Marxist-feminist framework (Bhattacharya 2017) analysing how labour power is reproduced through unpaid domestic, care, and emotional labour. Key insight: capitalism depends on a sphere of activity it simultaneously devalues and renders invisible. SRT asks not just who produces commodities, but what produces the producer.

Why must the SDL be analysed intersectionally?

The SDL is not experienced uniformly — race, class, migration status, and coloniality shape whose labour is extracted and how. Davis: the housewife model never applied to Black women or working-class women. E&H: migrant care workers are racialised as naturally nurturing. A gender binary disclaimer should frame any essay using the SDL concept.

What is 'intimate labour' and why does it matter?

Labour involving touch, bodily contact, and the performance of personal closeness (Boris & Parreñas 2010). Distinct from reproductive labour more broadly — it captures the specifically embodied and affective dimensions of care and sex work. Key for analysing global care chains and the sex industry: what is being extracted is not just time or effort but intimacy itself, rendering it both harder to value and easier to exploit.

Sex work, colonial geography, and the SDL/IDL link

Female sex workers are disproportionately concentrated in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia (Vandepitte et al. 2006) — regions corresponding directly to primary sites of colonial resource extraction. The extractive logics of colonialism have not disappeared but shifted terrain: from natural resources to women's bodies. Kempadoo (2004): Western men's sex tourism constitutes a reassertion of colonial desire and racial superiority reproduced under globalisation. The SDL and IDL converge most literally here.

The 'stalled revolution' — what is it and why does it matter?

Hochschild's concept: women have entered paid work in large numbers but men have not made a comparable shift into domestic labour — the 'gender revolution' has stalled at the household threshold. Evidence: HETUS 2015 (women still do 60% more unpaid work); E&H: "men in their families did little to increase their contribution to the work of the home." Globalisation has externalised rather than resolved this stall — the care deficit is outsourced to migrant women rather than redistributed between men and women.

Davis (1983) — wages for housework: would it change anything?

Davis argues paying women for housework would entrench rather than liberate — institutionalising domestic labour as women's work rather than challenging the gendered division itself. Federici's counter: demanding wages is itself the refusal — "just to want wages for housework means to refuse that work as the expression of our nature, and therefore to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us." The disagreement is whether remuneration politicises or entrenches.