Women in Latin America and the Caribbean - Cepal

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A. CAREGIVING, UNPAID DOMESTIC WORK AND GENDER EQUALITY
Caregiving has been analysed from a variety of perspectives. Firstly, it has been understood as the most
basic survival activity. Human beings require care from birth for their feeding, health and personal
development, and caring therefore has psychological and emotional connotations that are inseparable
from the life of any human being. Societies have organized caregiving activities both within and outside
the family. As noted earlier, these tasks have usually been associated with women because of the cultural
assumption that they tend to form networks whereas men tend to develop their individual capabilities.
Secondly, each society organizes caregiving in the public sphere, with policies for childcare, nutrition,
health, education and others, which have traditionally relied for their success on the active involvement of
women. Research has shown again and again that, as well as working in the private sphere, women have
also played the role of intermediaries between primary health policies and health ministries, childcare
services, the receipt of cash transfers for family welfare and anti-poverty programmes, while producing
and organizing the consumption of donated foodstuffs and other anti-poverty programmes that have been
conducted in the region (Serrano, 2005). In almost all these studies, women’s time is a non-existent
variable and so its economic value is not included in calculations.
Caregiving is part of the unpaid work of social or domestic reproduction. This work is part of a
material and symbolic process characterized by maintenance of the home and domestic goods, physical
care and nutrition, socialization, the education and upbringing of minors, the maintenance of social
relationships and psychological support for family members. Although the functions of this work have
been the same for centuries, the actual activities carried out, their relative weight and the technology used
to attain the intended objectives reflect the cultural diversity and economic inequalities of each country
and the historical changes that have occurred in society and the family.
Some authors (Picchio, 2001) divide this work into: (i) domestic work, meaning the processing of
goods and the care and maintenance of the home; (ii) caring for people (mainly children, the sick and the
elderly), and (iii) work done of necessity, namely interaction between the domestic and public spheres entailed
by family responsibilities, such as taking children to school, paying bills, or carrying out other necessary tasks
and procedures; other authors have called these activities “support services” (García and De Oliveira, 2006).
The relative weight of these three components has changed over time but the total burden has not, an example
being the case of families where the time spent preparing food diminishes over the life cycle, but the time spent
on children or on necessary care activities increases.
Care work has quality characteristics that are of vital importance for the sustainability of the
system as a whole, and this gives it institutional significance. Since well-being is the ultimate objective of
social reproduction work, this has a structural connection with the production, distribution and exchange
of wealth, making it one of the major aggregates of the economic system (Picchio, 2001). The need for
unpaid work is permanent, since it makes up the gap between available income and social consumption
norms, and in particular between the conditions of wage-paying work and living conditions. The income
boost represented by unpaid work is not just a statistical convention but is real and serves to narrow the
gap between family resources and consumption levels. The permanent and growing tensions and
contradictions between the conditions of the social reproduction process and those of goods production
require a new social pact; they cannot be resolved through symbolic enhancement of the capabilities of
women (who are increasingly perceived as “superwomen” in the public mind), or through cash subsidies
to families, unless there is also a debate in which these tensions and contradictions are approached as
inherent characteristics of the economic and social system (Picchio, 2001).