Of course, it’s not just childcare that affects female paid employment. Elder care also takes up significant amounts of women’s time, and demand is set to increase.45 Between 2013 and 2050, the global population aged sixty or over is projected to more than double.46 By 2020, for the first time in history, the number of people aged sixty and over will outnumber children younger than five.47 And along with getting older, the world is getting sicker. By 2014, nearly a quarter of the world’s disease burden was in people aged over sixty – most of it chronic.48 By 2030 an estimated 6 million older people in the UK (nearly 9% of the total population) will be living with a long-term illness.49 The EU has already passed this milestone: 10% of its population50 (around 50 million citizens51) are estimated to suffer from two or more chronic conditions. Most of them are sixty-five years and over.52 In the US, 80% of over-sixty-fives have at least one chronic condition, and 50% have at least two.53
All these care needs (the US has an unpaid labour force of 40 million providing care for sick and elderly relatives54) affect women’s ability to work. Female carers are almost seven times more likely than men to cut back from full-time to part-time work.55 US women aged between fifty-five and sixty-seven who care for their parents unpaid reduce their paid work hours by, on average, 41%,56 and 10% of US women caring for someone with dementia have lost job benefits.57 In the UK, 18% of women who care for someone with dementia have taken a leave of absence from work, and nearly 19% have had to quit work either to become a carer or because their caregiving duties became a priority, while 20% of female carers have gone from working full-time to part-time. This is the case for only 3% of male carers.58
If governments want to tap the GDP source of women’s increased participation in paid labour it’s clear that they have to reduce women’s unpaid work: McKinsey found that a decrease in the time British women spend doing unpaid work from five to three hours correlated with a 10% increase in their paid labour-force participation.59 As we’ve seen, introducing properly paid maternity and paternity leave is an important step to achieving this, by increasing female paid employment and potentially even helping to close the gender pay gap60 – which is in itself a boon to GDP. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research has found that if women had been paid equally in 2016, the US economy would have produced $512.6 billion more in income – which is 2.8% of 2016’s GDP, and represents ‘approximately 16 times what the federal and state governments spent in fiscal year 2015 on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families’.61
A more dramatic government intervention than the introduction of paid parental leave would be to invest in social infrastructure. The term infrastructure is generally understood to mean the physical structures that underpin the functioning of a modern society: roads, railways, water pipes, power supplies. It doesn’t tend to include the public services that similarly underpin the functioning of a modern society like child and elder care.
The Women’s Budget Group argues that it should.62 Because, like physical infrastructure, what the WBG calls social infrastructure ‘yields returns to the economy and society well into the future in the form of a better educated, healthier and better cared for population’. Arguably then, this exclusion of care services from the general concept of ‘infrastructure’ is just another unquestioned male bias in how we structure our economy.
Take early childhood education (ECE) and high-quality formal childcare including for very young toddlers and infants. Investment in these can actually reduce overall education spend because it lowers the level of investment required in remedial education.63 It also improves cognitive development, educational achievement and health outcomes64 for children (particularly socio-economically disadvantaged children).65 All of which increases productivity in the long run.66
A report on two ECE pilot studies found that by the age of forty, US children who received ECE were more likely to be employed (76% versus 62%) and to have higher median annual earnings ($20,800 versus $15,300).67 They were also more likely to own homes (37% versus 28%); a car (82% versus 60%); and to have savings accounts (76% versus 50%). ECE was also found to have wider indirect effects of a lower crime rate, resulting in lower law-enforcement costs. The report concluded that investing in ECE had a greater positive impact on long-term economic growth than business subsidies, and would lead to an extra 3.5% growth in GDP by 2080.
But despite all these potential gains, social-infrastructure investment is often overlooked, in no small part because of the data gap when it comes to unpaid work. This gender data gap has led, Nancy Folbre explains, to its ‘pay-off’ being ‘understated’.68 In fact, the pay-off could be huge. In the UK it would generate up to 1.5 million jobs, compared to 750,000 for an equivalent investment in construction. In the US, an investment of 2% of GDP in the caring industries ‘would create nearly 13 million new jobs, compared to the 7.5 million jobs that would be created by investing 2% of GDP in the construction sector’.69 And, because the care sector is (currently) a female-dominated industry, many of these new jobs would go to women – remember that increasing female employment drives GDP.
The WBG found that investing 2% of GDP in public care services in the UK, US, Germany and Australia ‘would create almost as many jobs for men as investing in construction industries [. . .] but would create up to four times as many jobs for women’.70 In the US, where two-thirds of newly created care jobs would go to women compared to only one-third of newly created construction-sector jobs,71 this investment would increase women’s employment rate by up to eight points, reducing the gender employment gap by half.72 In the UK the investment would reduce the gender employment gap by a quarter (a correction not to be sniffed at given it is women’s jobs that have been hardest hit by austerity policies).73
As well as increasing female paid employment (and therefore GDP) by actively creating new jobs for women, investing in social infrastructure can also increase female paid employment by reducing the amount of unpaid labour women have to do. The employment rate of UK mothers with children aged three to five is 6% lower than the OECD average. In 2014, 41% of mothers of children under four were employed full-time, compared to 82% of childless women and 84% of fathers.74 This sex disparity is partly due to societal expectations (enshrined in law via unequal maternity-and paternity-leave allowances) that the mother be the primary carer. But it’s also because of the gender pay gap: for many heterosexual couples it makes financial sense for the woman to be the one to reduce her working hours, because she tends to be the one who is earning less.
And then there’s the cost of childcare. Recent research from the UK’s Department for Education found that 54% of mothers who don’t work outside the home said they would like to ‘if they could obtain convenient, reliable, and affordable childcare’.75 But on the whole, they can’t. Childcare costs in the UK have outstripped general inflation over the last ten to fifteen years,76 with UK parents spending 33% of their net household income on childcare against an OECD average of 13%.77 Unsurprisingly, therefore, the UK has highly unequal take-up of childcare by socio-economic levels, particularly compared to other OECD countries.78 And this also has a knock-on effect on female paid employment: 29% (this rose to nearly 50% of low-to middle-income mothers) of British women told McKinsey that ‘returning to work after having a child is not financially viable – twice the number of men who say the same thing’.79