Every day, people around the world spend 16 billion hours on unpaid care work -- cooking for their families, cleaning up after them, caring for children and older relatives and all the other routine household tasks. These activities are happening all day, at every hour, in every country around the world. But because many don't get paid for this work, most of us take it for granted.
[The Way We Work]
Care work is a catch-all term for all the tasks and chores that are done in service of other people. Some care work is paid, like medicine, nursing or being a nanny, but a tremendous amount is done for free. And this unpaid care work is overwhelmingly done by women. There have been so many women in my own life who provided both paid and unpaid care work. My mother and my grandmother before her. Eswari, who was nursing my grandmother in her final years. Patricia, who cares for my children when I travel for work. And I've been an unpaid caregiver, too, caring for my immediate family, but also spending several months caring for ailing friends, their children and my dad in his last days. I've come to realize that unpaid care work makes all other work possible.
During the COVID pandemic, with the closure of schools and the strain on the health care system, the amount of time spent on unpaid care and domestic work doubled for working parents. This has been a disaster for women around the world. Compounding the stress and pushing millions out of the paid labor market altogether. It set the clock back on progress by decades. But at the same time, the pandemic also made care work visible. It showed up in the background of our Zoom calls and in our need to limit overtime. And so many workplaces were able to integrate and even celebrate this new reality. Right now, we have an incredible opportunity to recognize the care work in our lives, reframe it for ourselves and build workplaces that are much more accommodating of it.
And here's where we can start. If you are someone providing care, the biggest thing you can do is name it for yourself and for others. Care work. It's not a distraction if you're fitting it around paid employment. You're not "taking a break" if you’re on sabbatical caring for someone in need. This is real, critical work that can be exhausting, frustrating and even boring. Give yourself permission to feel all of the emotions you'd feel if the work came accompanied by a paycheck. And when you're talking to your manager about it, don't feel like you need to apologize. Remember, this is a fact of life, and be as explicit as you can about your needs. Do you need three months at home or do you need Tuesday mornings for a standing appointment?
As a caregiver, it's also important to recognize the skills that you gain doing this work. There is so much involved with giving care -- handling transport, logistics, interpreting medical charts, managing financials. These are valuable skills that are relevant to all kinds of contexts. So if you have a job, frame caregiving to your colleagues that way. And if you’re looking for paid work, don't treat it as a big empty gap in your life. Put it on your CV and outline the skills that you've gained from it. Skills like multitasking, project management or communication.
But of course it's not just on individuals to change how the wider world thinks about care work. We need systemic change from employers, too. The biggest thing that employers can do is to make space for employees to talk about care work without being penalized or seen as less focused or dedicated. Caregiving should be a topic that's brought up early when new employees first start their training. Workplaces should track and understand the kind of care work employees are responsible for and what kind of policy changes are needed to make their lives better and more productive. And employers should make sure that caregivers aren't passed over for key projects or promotions just because of their duties at home.
Caregiving is such a fundamental aspect of being human, and yet it's so artificially cleansed from our work lives. Instead of treating it like a secret, workplaces can bring it out into the open. And of course, workplaces need to offer flexibility to accommodate the lived realities of caregivers. For employees who are parents, in addition to parental leave, this means allowing them time off when kids are sick or home from school. It means letting them establish dark zones in their calendar around school drop offs, bath time, bedtime rituals and respecting those boundaries. It means offering remote work options. For people caring for elders or those who are sick or disabled, this means giving them reasonable amounts of leave. It means building projects that are based on milestones and deliverables, rather than relying on frequent meetings and check-ins alone. It means being really flexible about when and where the work gets done. And workplaces often thrive as a result.
And one final point. Care work is one of the fastest-growing sectors of our economy. As a result of a growing and an aging population, over two billion people in the world will need care by 2030. This means that the time is now to shift the way we think about caring for them. This aging population is going to need support. They're going to need new solutions. This means innovations, jobs, new industries. And where many other jobs are lost to automation, the one job that we're so uniquely good at as humans is caring for other humans.
