Conference Agenda

While analysis on the incidence, distribution and trends in disability are limited due to the lack of appropriate data, the available studies have found a positive correlation between poverty and disability both at individual and household level, and that disability is generally associated with multidimensional poverty. The literature is especially lacking in the understanding of gender differences among people with disabilities. Individual time-use analysis demonstrates that women with disabilities work more than men with disabilities. Women in the households with persons with disabilities also work more than men in households with persons with disabilities.

Using the first-ever nationally representative Time Use Survey Data (2019), the present study examines the division of unpaid work between heterosexual couples in the Indian context. For making the couples, the analysis follows the rules suggested by Sobek and Kennedy (2009). We test three micro-level theories offering explanations for the difference in time use between husbands and wives. The first one is relative resource bargaining (Blood & Wolfe, 1960). The relative resources theory explains that the division of housework reflects the resources in the form of education, earnings, etc., which husbands and wives bring to the relationship. In the absence of information on earnings, we use the education gap among the spouses as an indicator of relative resources (Davis & Greenstein, 2004).

The second hypothesis postulates that the division of housework would depend upon the time available with the spouses after the time spent in the labour market (or paid work) (Presser, 1994). For time availability, we use the information on the number of hours spent on paid work on the diary day. We construct a categorical variable that indicates whether, in dual-earner families, husband and wife work full-time or part-time in paid work.

The third set of theories attributes the differences in the division of housework between couples to the notion of doing gender (West & Zimmerman, 1987) and deviance neutralization (Greenstein, 2000). This set of theories focuses on gender norms governing the division of unpaid work between couples. Due to the absence of a direct measure for norms, we segregate the analysis for traditional breadwinner families (with only husband in paid work) and dual-earner families.

Our results suggest that unpaid work reduces for the wife if she is more educated than the husband. If the husband works part-time while the wife works full-time, he contributes more to the housework. However, if both husband and wife work full-time, the burden of housework falls disproportionately on the wife. This suggests that the norm of doing gender and deviance neutralization also governs the division of housework between Indian couples.

This paper describes the current landscape of the care economy in Sri Lanka and provides the first estimates of the paid care sector in Sri Lanka using Labour Force Survey data collected by the Department of Census and Statistics during the pre- and pandemic years.

The care economy refers to the structures and institutions (including social patterns) of paid and unpaid work that contribute to the nurturing and reproduction of present and future populations. The care economy includes childcare, elder care, education, healthcare, and personal, social and domestic services provided in both paid and unpaid forms within formal and informal sectors (Peng, 2021). Care is provided in all societies by four institutions: family, community, market and state, which make up the four points of the “care diamond” (Razavi, 2007). This paper focuses primarily on care workers providing paid care services to children and the elderly in Sri Lanka.

The paper describes the care landscape in relation to early childhood care and elderly care, and discusses challenges in measuring paid care work in the context of Sri Lanka. These challenges include those common to several developing countries, where much care work is informal, and occupational categories may encompass several different types of work, for e.g. that done by domestic workers. In addition, care work, like many service sectors faced a contraction during the pandemic, which was exacerbated by the economic crisis that followed in Sri Lanka, and these factors posed additional challenges.

Finally, the paper provides first-ever estimates of employment, wages and hours worked in the paid care sector for Sri Lanka, drawing on Labour Force Survey data from the immediate pre-pandemic and from during the pandemic era.

Across the world, women spend 3X more time than men on unpaid care work. This disproportionate burden of responsibilities is a major cause of time poverty amongst women, constraining their participation in the labour market. Globally, the lack of affordable care for children or family members decreases women’s chances of participating in the labour market by almost 5 percentage points in developing countries and 4 percentage points in developed countries. On the other hand, investments in care services have the potential to generate up to 299 million jobs by 2035, of which 78 per cent are expected to go to women.

Given this context, the paper undertakes an analysis of the gender-disaggregated data from India’s National Statistical Organisation’s Time-Use Survey 2019 and finds that Indian women spend 8X more hours on unpaid care work than men, with the imbalance being greater in urban areas. Gender imbalances in unpaid work persist despite educational attainment and employment status: women with higher education or in employment do not spend any less time on unpaid care work. Additionally, the gendered burden of unpaid work on married women is about much higher than their unmarried counterparts.

Care economy investment is crucial for increasing women’s workforce participation, creating jobs, and improving the quality of care for all. Several G-20 economies are actively investing in care and domestic work infrastructure to increase economic and social resilience. For example, through a participatory process, Argentina formulated a project for a federal care system. Indian care services rely on millions of informal women workers, recognised as a crucial interface between health systems, schools and communities.

Drawing on these international best practices, this paper provides policy recommendations for building care infrastructure and providing care services, aiming to reduce the burden of women’s unpaid work. The focus of policy recommendations is on four key pillars (i) strategies to identify and prioritise care infrastructure requirements; (ii) implementing skill training and formalising working conditions for care workers; (iii) leveraging public-private partnerships and alternate financing arrangements to foster investments in affordable and reliant care infrastructure; and (iv) advocating actionable policy solutions for care services in urban and rural contexts. Most notably, we recommend that shifting mindsets and rebalancing domestic work requires a coordinated effort from key stakeholders, with public-led investments in care infrastructure and services complemented by soft interventions from private-sector employers and community-based organisations.