Women’s Economic Empowerment and the State
Analysis of women’s paid and unpaid work in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ghana, India and Ireland has found a common economic thread: the largely invisible economy of care is a key barrier to women’s economic security, no matter where they live.
The scholarship was funded by the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN), the University of Alberta and the University of Sydney, and led by University of Alberta Professor Rhonda Breitkreuz and University of Sydney Professor Marian Baird. It reached across the Global North and Global South, showing that in some regions in the Global South a staggering 92 per cent of women’s employment is informal. And in high-income countries such as Australia, Canada and Ireland, where most employment is protected by labour laws, women still experience a gendered pay gap and often cut back on paid work to accommodate unpaid work responsibilities.
Globally, women perform 75 per cent of all unpaid work, totalling an estimated 11 billion hours every single day. If assigned a dollar value, this work would account for between 15 per cent and 50 per cent of a country’s entire GDP.
For Professor Breitkreuz, “These facts are fundamental to understanding economic empowerment for women.”
The scholarship was brought together in a new book, Women’s Economic Empowerment and the State: A Critical Human Ecological Approach, highlighting how ideology and government policies create enabling or disabling environments for women. In-country experts document the fragile nexus between labour force attachment and unpaid care work, the challenges of entrepreneurship, the persistence of gendered social norms, and government policies that either help or hinder women’s employment.
The insights expose a weakness in common strategies to address women’s economic security such as labour market participation, entrepreneurship and personal income generation: they overlook the reality that women still perform the lion’s share of the world’s unpaid household and care work. Professor Breitkreuz asks, “How do we ensure women’s economic autonomy without simply burdening them with a ‘double shift’ of paid and unpaid labour?” And she goes further, explaining, “Simply giving a woman a job doesn’t empower her if that job is precarious, underpaid, or adds an impossible double burden to her existing responsibilities.”
Thanks to connections forged through WUN, the scholars found that while women’s social, political, and economic environments differ across countries, the themes of gendered time and precarious resources transcend borders.
The authors conclude that one step toward an equitable world is for governments to address unpaid care work through a focus on the ILO’s ‘5Rs’ – recognise, reduce, redistribute, reward and represent.
Women’s Economic Empowerment and the State: A Critical Human Ecological Approach
(Rhonda Breitkreuz & Marian Baird, Eds.)