How the Caring Economy Can Revive Us
By Sarah Kaplan
Economic policy-making has, over the past hundred years or more, stripped out caring from our understanding of what makes the economy tick. Caring – for children, for elders, for the planet – sounds to many like a distraction from the main attraction, especially during the pandemic, when what we need are jobs and robust economic growth.
But as the COVID-19 pandemic brought the global economy to a grinding halt, locking down working parents and idling activity in many sectors, it became clear that if we don’t put caring back into the economy, we can’t achieve economic recovery. The pandemic has revealed economic fault lines that must be addressed. We can’t “get back to normal”; we need to create a better normal. And we certainly won’t be able to build back better without making the caring economy a critical component of federal recovery plans.
He-cessions and she-coveries
In past recessions, downturns would most deeply affect goods-producing industries, which have historically been dominated by men. Canadian economist Armine Yalnizyan named these “he-cessions” that were then followed by “she-coveries” as women increased their participation in paid work to support household incomes. This kind of “within-family insurance” meant women provided the stopgap in hard times.
The 2020 economic crisis has taken a different path. It’s become clear that the traditional “family insurance” model doesn’t work in a pandemic recession. Service sectors such as retail, personal services, childcare and hospitality were among the hardest hit – sectors staffed predominantly by women. In Canada, 56% of women workers are concentrated in these occupations, compared to 17% of men. This “she-cession” has meant that in March 2020, 63% of job losses fell to women, and as the economy reopens, women’s jobs are coming back at less than half the rate of men’s.
Those job losses have been exacerbated by closed schools and shuttered daycare centres. Because of gendered norms about who is responsible for children, many women have had to switch from full-time to part-time work or leave jobs entirely to care for or home-school children of all ages.
In August, UN chief António Guterres cautioned that the pandemic may undo three decades of progress toward gender equality in economic opportunity. “Without a [concerted] response,” he noted, “we risk losing a generation or more of gains.”
Writing caring out of the economy
Feminist economists have for years pointed out that production (in the market economy for goods and services) and reproduction (in starting and maintaining families) are intimately intertwined. Unpaid work caring for children, elders and households enables the economic activities that get counted by measurements such as gross domestic product (GDP). However, in traditional economic thought and practice, women’s work at home was seen as altruistic and having no “value” since it was not sold on the market the way male activities were. Though if we were to value women’s unpaid work at home, it would be something like US$10.8 trillion globally each year.
Separating care work done by women from the image of the economy has been so effective that today in implicit association tests – meant to measure our preconscious cognitive biases – more than 75% of people (of all genders) associate women with family and men with careers.
Read the full article in Corporate Knights: How the Caring Economy Can Revive Us.