Who Cares? - The Importance of Unpaid Work
Around the world unpaid care work traps women and girls in poverty, yet it is not captured in any data or mentioned in any databases.
Shockingly, on average women spend nearly four and a half hours each day doing unpaid care work, compared to around one and a half hours for men. We work with women who spend up to 18 hours a day on unpaid work.
These jobs are more difficult in the poorest communities, where not only are there no time-saving devices such as dishwashers and washing machines, but there is often no mains water or electricity. Many women must walk for miles to fetch water or firewood before even starting their household chores.
The impact of this imbalance is severe. As long as women and girls are forced to spend their time in this way, they will be blocked from getting jobs, an education, participating in political decision making or having any rest or leisure time.
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Photo caption: Parbati with her husband. Photo credit: Bigyan Dewol/ActionAid Nepal
We have a powerful, simple and perhaps surprising way of helping to tackle this form of gender inequality: diaries.
Our colleagues in Nepal use care diaries, in which family members keep track of how much time each day they spend on different chores. It makes invisible work visible, and shows men and boys just how much more work their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers are doing in the home. They are often astonished at the difference and commit to carrying out their fair share. This has had a transformative effect on the lives of women and girls and their wider communities, which become stronger and more prosperous thanks to their participation.
In the Doti region, we recently worked with 200 couples who kept care diaries, including Parbati and her husband Khadka.
Parbati said: “My husband realised that my workload was three times more than his and it was also affecting my health. It really had a positive impact on our lives and my husband gradually started to support me in the household chores.”
The diaries also helped ActionAid identify the community’s most pressing needs. As a result, in Doti region we set up two community childcare centres, two drinking water taps closer to the women’s homes, a rice mill and a thresher machine.
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Parbati’s story
Parbati and her husband, Khadka, live with their three children in the Doti region of Nepal. It is a very poor area where women work up to 18 hours a day, taking care of children and elderly people, feeding the cattle, growing crops, washing clothes, and fetching drinking water and firewood.
Parbati was one of these women.
She said: “I belong to a poor family, and we have many siblings so my parents could not afford to send us to school, and I got married early. My husband went to India as a migrant worker.
“This left me all the responsibilities of my children as well as my in-laws, taking care of them, working in the farm and doing all the chores. After working in India for few years my husband came back home and he started to work for daily wages but my routine was the same. My husband did not care about my workload at all as he believed that it is a women’s responsibility to do the chores.”
Parbati’s life changed for the better when she joined an ActionAid women’s group. Alongside ten other couples in the village, she and Khadka kept a care diary.
She said: “My husband realized that my workload was three times more than his and it was also affecting my health. It really had a positive impact in our lives and my husband gradually started to support me in the household chores. My husband now goes out to fetch water, collect firewood, collect fodder, cleaning utensils, feeding the animals, and even cooking.”
This sharing of labour enabled both Parbati and Khadka to start work as vegetable farmers together.
Parbati says: “My husband does not have to go to India or work in daily wages. There is a harmony in our family and we have a secured source of income. This is all possible due to the awareness raising of ActionAid by making us understand that care work is a shared responsibility and together we can make it happen.”
