Conference Agenda

The question of care, and how to organise it, is globally pertinent and touches not only gendered care and dependencies but also ethics of care, reflected in how care is governed and what becomes emphasised in the analyses. Societal discourses on the governance of care revolve around the issues of quality (ethics), costs (economy) and assumed or proposed remedies (technology). Ethics cut through these discourses by questioning, for example, the values in the political decisions and the politically set national priorities and reactions. With the emergence of market governance mechanisms, the categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’, and formal and informal, are blurred and fluid. ‘Economisation’ refers to the economic instrumental rationalities, processes and practices that increasingly rule social life. ‘Financialisation’ for its part follows economisation and banks on capital formation: in care, it ranges from global investment funds acquiring private care homes to the attempts to standardise care as private equity and transform care into a tradable asset. In this process, technologies align with financialisation, with no interest or relation to informal care arrangements.

Globally pertinent questions regarding the organising of care address not only contents, ethics and policies, but also costs and deficits. In the Global North, migrant women have supplemented the void of care. When the cost – and not lack of – care workers is the main rationale in global care migration, the costs, politics and ethics of care arrangements transcend national boundaries.

The stated societal ‘care crises’ consist of complex moral, political, economic and social dimensions, which need to be contextualised, with the limits of validity articulated, clarity in the definitions and frames used, and delimitations of the analyses laid out. This paper is a further development of an earlier published book chapter on the disconnectedness of the societal, economic and political aspects of care.

In recent years, the penetration of digital platforms is having a profound impact on firms and sectors, as they reorganize markets, business practices and work arrangements, in a growing number of economic activities, also in traditional sectors, with a high level of informality and very feminized, such as care and domestic work. The objective of this study is to critically examine how digital care platforms operate, their business models and competitive strategies, and how platforms intervene in the existing care landscape, affect carers' working conditions and impact on the social organization of care. In particular, this paper aims to contribute to answer these research questions: How are digital platforms transforming everyday lives through value creation, addition, and capture of care work? How are digital platforms transforming the nature of work, and changing labour dynamics and power relations by gender/race or other intersectional factors?

An essential route towards achieving gender equality and sustainability is to ensure a fair distribution of unpaid care work between all the agents of care diamond, namely, market, state, families and non-profit organizations in an economy. Within families also, unpaid care work such as cooking, cleaning, caring of children, old, sick and disabled people is often carried out by women, which limits their economic, social and political opportunities. Gender inequality in unpaid care work is a global phenomenon, however, it is more acute in developing countries like India. The aim of the study is to analyze household unpaid care work from an intersectional perspective, which is crucial for monitoring India’s progress towards achieving sustainable development goals, using the latest 2019 Indian Time Use data. It has been observed that average time spent by women in unpaid care work is 241 minutes per day whereas men spend 31 minutes per day in unpaid care work, validating the presence of stark gender inequality of unpaid care work in India. In order to ensure that those women who perform unpaid care work are not marginalized or excluded from opportunities for personal and professional development, it is imperative to find out most vulnerable group of women, bearing relatively higher burden of unpaid care work as compared to other women. By employing ordinary least square regression, it is found that the burden of unpaid care work is larger for women who are in the productive age group of 15-29 years, married, educated, living in rural areas, having small children at homes, not in labour force, belonging to lower income households, nuclear families and marginalized social groups. The target 5.4 of sustainable development goal 5, emphasizes on recognition and valuation of unpaid care work with the help of provision of public services, infrastructure and nationally appropriate social policies and encouraging sharing of responsibilities of unpaid care work within the family members. Promoting an equitable distribution of unpaid care work between men and women, as well as among agents of care diamond, can help address both gender inequality and sustainability challenges. This can be achieved by promoting policies that support paid family leave, flexible working arrangements, affordable physical and social infrastructure, as well as by promoting cultural norms that value the contribution of men in unpaid care work.

This paper reports research on gender differences in the length of the working day and the experience of time poverty in Ghana’s Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA). Previous research has found that women are more likely to be time poor than men, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (Bardasi and Wodon, 2010; Gammage, 2010; Arora, 2015; Naynzu, 2017; Orkoh et al., 2020) although there are exceptions. This study uses a mixed-methods approach that enabled time poverty to be considered from different perspectives, contributing substantial insights into the long working days of women and men in urban sub-Saharan Africa.

In previous research on time poverty, time spent travelling to work has been considered ‘necessary time’ integral to the working day (Kalenkoski et al., 2011) but commuting time has rarely been incorporated explicitly in analyses. This analysis takes into account often long and arduous commutes in the urbanised GAMA marking a contribution. There are also gender inequality considerations in that women are more likely to use cheaper means of transport, often less comfortable, slower and sometimes less safe, to get to work.

The mixed-methods approach combined primary quantitative data from a survey completed by 799 people and qualitative data from 24 focus groups involving 200 participants. The analysis of the survey data found that women were more time poor than men and they were more likely to be both time and income poor. Women devote on average almost 25 minutes per day more to household work and report marginally longer commutes than men. Time poverty was also found to be associated negatively with an index of life satisfaction.

The analysis of the focus group data provided further insights on the associations between long working days, commuting and well-being. Women were more likely to raise issues around unpaid domestic labour with many of them having very little time for leisure, having to get up very early and go to bed late to fit in household chores. Thus, their excessive or double burden of work (Arora, 2015) causes them to suffer a ‘double squeeze’ on their time resulting in significant time poverty and lower subjective well-being. Women's lower levels of satisfaction with the transport mode of their commute reflected their higher usage of less comfortable public transport, specifically trotros which were associated with negative physical and psychological health impacts due to risk of physical injury, and potential damage to or loss of property.