The Quick Read
- The journey of the care economy begins inside households, where cooking, cleaning, childcare, eldercare and support for people with disabilities were long treated as family responsibilities rather than economic work.
- Feminist economists, time-use surveys and women’s movements made this labour visible. The Beijing Platform for Action and the Sustainable Development Goals gradually placed unpaid care within international policy.
- The pandemic exposed what years of research had already shown: hospitals, schools, businesses and labour markets cannot function when care systems collapse.
- The United Nations established the International Day of Care and Support in 2023. In 2024, the International Labour Conference adopted the first global tripartite resolution on decent work and the care economy.
- Paid care already represents hundreds of millions of jobs. Closing care-service gaps could create almost 300 million more by 2035.
- The market is expanding through childcare, eldercare, home healthcare, assisted living, domestic services and care technology. But growth will mean little if care workers remain informal, underpaid and overwhelmingly female.
- Governments must stop treating care as a women’s welfare issue. It is economic infrastructure, employment policy, human development and preparation for an ageing world.
The journey of the care economy: A real-life routine
Every morning, the economy performs a quiet disappearing act.
Someone wakes a child, prepares breakfast, helps an older parent bathe, finds a missing schoolbook, monitors medication, cleans the kitchen and rearranges the day around a family member who cannot be left alone.
Then the official working day begins. The meeting is counted; the sale is counted; the factory shift is counted; the delivery is counted; the labour that made all of them possible usually is not.
For most of modern economic history, care appeared as affection, duty or family responsibility. It was considered too personal to be an industry, too ordinary to be expertise, and too closely associated with women to be treated as productive work. That story is changing.
Childcare is entering employment policy. Eldercare is becoming a major market. Governments are debating care leave and public investment. Businesses are beginning to connect caregiving support with retention. International institutions now describe care as essential to economic resilience, gender equality and decent work.
This is the journey of the care economy: from the private home to the public budget, from women’s invisible time to an international policy agenda.
Recognition is a victory. It is also the beginning of a much harder argument about who will provide care, who will pay for it and whether its growing market will produce dignified work or simply commercialise the same inequality.
What is the care economy?
The care economy includes the work, services, institutions and relationships involved in meeting people’s physical, emotional, developmental and daily needs. It covers direct care such as:
- Feeding and looking after children;
- Teaching and early childhood development;
- Nursing patients;
- Assisting older people;
- Supporting people with disabilities;
- Providing mental-health and community support.
It also includes indirect care:
- Cooking;
- Cleaning;
- Washing clothes;
- Collecting water or fuel;
- Managing medication;
- Organising appointments;
- Maintaining a household.
Some of this work is paid. Much of it is not.
It happens in homes, hospitals, childcare centres, schools, nursing facilities, community programmes and private residences. Providers include family members, domestic workers, nurses, teachers, childcare workers, community-health workers and professional caregivers.
The International Labour Organisation defines the care economy broadly enough to include paid and unpaid work, direct and indirect care, and services delivered through governments, companies, non-profit organisations, social enterprises and households.
That breadth matters. Care is not one industry in the conventional sense. It is the infrastructure of human life.
The first stage: Care was everywhere, except in the economy
Care did not recently appear. It recently acquired a name that policy could not as easily ignore.
Traditional economic measurement placed the boundary of productive activity around transactions involving wages, prices or formal exchange. When a domestic worker cooked for a family, the service counted as employment. When a woman performed the same task without pay in her own home, it largely disappeared from economic statistics.
The meal remained necessary. Only its status changed. This exclusion was not accidental in effect. It helped create a model of the economy in which workers seemed to arrive educated, fed, healthy and ready for employment without accounting for the labour that produced and maintained them.
Women absorbed much of that cost. They reduced paid hours, interrupted careers, remained outside employment and performed extensive household work without independent income or social protection.
The imbalance remains enormous. Women carry out roughly three-quarters of unpaid care and domestic work globally and spend around two-and-a-half times as many hours on it as men.
The economy benefited from care while describing it as non-economic.
Feminist economists changed the question
For decades, feminist economists and women’s movements challenged the idea that only market transactions create economic value.
They asked a deceptively simple question: What would happen if unpaid care stopped?
Employees could not work normally. Children’s development would suffer. People recovering from illness would lose support. Older and disabled people would face greater risk. Public services would absorb enormous additional demand.
The question revealed that unpaid care was not located outside the economy. It was subsidising it.
Time-use surveys became a crucial tool in making the work visible. Instead of asking only whether a person was employed, these surveys recorded how people spent the hours in their day.
They showed that women’s apparently lower participation in paid work often sat beside a much longer unpaid working day.
The data changed the policy conversation. Women were not merely “not working”. They were performing work that governments and markets had chosen not to price. This recognition also complicated the familiar call to bring more women into employment.
A woman cannot simply add eight hours of paid work to a day already filled with unpaid care. Someone must reduce, redistribute or replace part of that labour. Workforce policy and care policy were always connected. The data made the connection harder to deny.
Beijing gave unpaid care a place in global policy
The 1995 Beijing Platform for Action marked an important political milestone. It called on governments to measure and recognise women’s unpaid work, including care and domestic labour, and to develop a fuller understanding of women’s economic contribution.
The document did not immediately rebuild care systems. Its significance lay in moving unpaid work from feminist critique into an agreed international framework.
20 years later, the Sustainable Development Goals made the commitment more explicit.
SDG target 5.4 asks countries to recognise and value unpaid care and domestic work through public services, infrastructure, social protection policies, and the promotion of shared responsibility within households.
It was a substantial change in language. Care was no longer framed only as something women needed help balancing. Governments were asked to build systems around it.
Still, policy moved slowly. Many countries acknowledged unpaid care in gender strategies while continuing to plan employment, transport, housing, health and social security as though households would somehow provide unlimited care without cost.
Recognition entered the declaration before it reached the budget.
The ageing world changed the economic calculation
Demographic change gave care a second route into policy.
People are living longer. Family sizes are shrinking. Chronic illness and disability require sustained support. In many societies, adult children live far from ageing parents, and the traditional assumption that a daughter or daughter-in-law will provide full-time care is becoming less workable.
The demand for long-term care is therefore growing while the informal supply on which governments have historically relied is becoming less certain. In OECD countries, women account for about nine in ten formal long-term-care workers.
This raises 2 connected concerns.
- The first is who will care for rapidly ageing populations.
- The second is whether societies will respond by building professional systems or by increasing the pressure on women to fill the gap privately.
Ageing turned care from a marginal women’s issue into a fiscal, labour-force and public-health concern. The need was no longer temporary. It was structural.
Then the pandemic removed the curtain
COVID-19 did not create the care crisis. It made the crisis impossible to keep backstage.
Schools and childcare centres closed. Families lost access to domestic and community support. Hospitals faced extraordinary pressure. Older people required protection and assistance.
Women absorbed a large share of the additional unpaid work while also forming much of the frontline health, education, domestic and social-care workforce.
Millions of workers discovered that their ability to remain employed depended on care services they had rarely considered part of workplace infrastructure.
Governments declared nurses, teachers, cleaners, childcare workers and community-health personnel essential.
Many of the people receiving that recognition continued to earn low wages and work with inadequate protection.
The pandemic produced an uncomfortable discovery:
The work society called low-skilled was holding up the work society called productive.
It also moved care from the edges of feminist policy into debates about resilience. A health system without enough nurses could not manage a crisis. A labour market without childcare could not reopen fully. A company without care support could not retain all its workers.
Care became an economic-continuity issue.
2023 and 2024 gave care formal global standing
The post-pandemic momentum led to two major international developments.
In July 2023, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing 29 October as the International Day of Care and Support. The resolution encouraged governments and other institutions to raise awareness, strengthen policy and increase investment in care systems.
A commemorative day does not by itself improve a caregiver’s wage. It does create an annual point of accountability for an issue that had rarely received formal international recognition.
A more consequential step followed in June 2024.
Governments, employers and workers at the International Labour Conference adopted the Resolution concerning decent work and the care economy. It was the first global tripartite agreement to define the care economy and establish guiding principles for improving it.
The resolution gave international backing to the 5R framework:
- Recognise the economic and social value of care.
- Reduce unnecessary and excessively burdensome unpaid care.
- Redistribute care more fairly between women and men, households, the state and the market.
- Reward paid care workers through decent wages and conditions.
- Represent care workers in decisions affecting their work.
The addition of reward and representation matters.
An earlier policy conversation could celebrate care while continuing to depend on underpaid women. The 5R framework asks whether the people performing paid care receive labour rights, social protection and a voice.
The ILO subsequently developed an action plan for 2024–30 and scheduled further work on possible gaps in international standards involving paternity, parental and other forms of care leave.
Care had moved beyond awareness. It had entered international labour governance.
The care economy is now a market story
The moral and gender-equality case remains central. Another force is accelerating attention: the market is growing.
The paid care economy already accounts for approximately 381 million jobs, or 11.5% of global employment, according to the UN system’s 2024 policy paper on transforming care systems.
Demand is expanding across:
- Childcare and early education;
- Home healthcare;
- Eldercare;
- Assisted living;
- Rehabilitation;
- Disability support;
- Mental-health services;
- Domestic services;
- Care-worker recruitment and training;
- Monitoring and assistive technologies;
- Platforms connecting families with caregivers.
Closing existing care-service gaps while improving working conditions could create almost 300 million jobs by 2035. UN Women also notes that investment in care could produce nearly three times as many jobs as comparable investment in construction, with lower emissions.
That makes care one of the largest potential employment engines in the world. But the word “market” needs careful handling.
A growing care market can improve access, create enterprises, professionalise work and give families more choices. It can also build profitable business models on badly paid women, fragmented gig work and families desperate for services.
Growth is not the same as development.
Why care demand will keep rising
Several long-term changes are converging.
- Populations are ageing: More people will require assistance with mobility, health, memory, medication and daily life over longer periods.
- Women are entering paid employment: Families cannot continue relying on women to provide unlimited full-time care at home while also expecting them to sustain careers.
- Households are becoming smaller: There may be fewer relatives living nearby to share responsibility.
- Migration separates families: Workers move for jobs while parents and dependants remain elsewhere, increasing demand for formal and remote care arrangements.
- Chronic conditions require continuing support: Care is not limited to medical treatment. People may need long-term assistance in managing disability, recovery or age-related needs.
Parents expect more from early childhood services
Childcare is increasingly recognised as both supervision and an investment in children’s development.
The World Bank estimates that around 350 million children below primary-school-entry age need childcare but do not have access to it.
The demand already exists. But the unresolved question is whether it will be met through quality public services, responsible private provision, unsupported households or some combination of all three.
India’s care economy is visible in every street and invisible in policy design
India has always had a large care economy. It appears in the Anganwadi centre, the household employing a domestic worker, the daughter caring for ageing parents, the nurse working a night shift, the ASHA worker visiting a pregnant woman and the grandmother providing unpaid childcare so that another woman can work.
Yet these parts are rarely treated as one economic system.
India’s care responsibilities are shaped by scale, informality, unequal public services and deeply gendered household expectations.
Its 2019 Time Use Survey found a substantial divide between women’s and men’s unpaid domestic and caregiving work. The figures helped move the conversation beyond assumptions, but a unified national care framework has yet to emerge.
India has schemes for nutrition, childcare, health, maternity support, disability and older persons. It also has employment and skilling programmes connected to care occupations.
The policies remain dispersed across departments and levels of government. The result is that families continue to assemble care privately.
Those with money purchase services. Those without money provide care through women’s unpaid time.
Change in Content’s examination of cash schemes for women in India raised this concern directly: financial transfers can offer valuable relief, but they risk becoming compensation for care burdens that public systems have not reduced or redistributed.
A payment may recognise women’s contribution. It does not build a childcare centre, train an eldercare worker or give the woman several hours of her day back.
India is beginning to connect care with employment
There are signs of a wider approach.
Tamil Nadu’s Women Employment and Safety programme, supported by the World Bank, will combine job access with services such as crèches, eldercare, safe transport and harassment-response mechanisms. It is designed to benefit 1.6 million women. That is important because it avoids presenting employability as the whole solution.
Training a woman does not create time for her to work. Childcare, eldercare, transport and safety influence whether she can use the skill.
The World Bank is also increasingly treating childcare as a source of jobs, an investment in children and an enabler of women’s employment. Its current work includes childcare-enterprise models in India and several other countries.
India’s next step should be to join these efforts within a national care-economy strategy.
That strategy would need to address both sides:
- The right of families to reliable care;
- The right of care workers to decent work.
One cannot be built by sacrificing the other.
The invisible workers inside the visible market
Care is attracting technology companies, staffing agencies, home-health businesses and platform models. These services can solve genuine problems.
Families may find trained caregivers more easily. Remote monitoring can support older people living alone. Digital records can improve continuity. Scheduling platforms can make fragmented services more accessible.
Yet technology does not remove the labour at the centre of care.
Someone still lifts the patient. Comforts the child. Notices the behaviour change. Responds when the older person is confused. Manages the unpredictable part of another human being’s day. The market often values the platform more highly than the worker providing the service.
That imbalance should concern policymakers and investors. Care workers may face:
- Informal contracts;
- Irregular hours;
- Low or delayed wages;
- Live-in arrangements without privacy;
- Emotional and physical exhaustion;
- Exposure to harassment in private homes;
- Inadequate training;
- No route to promotion;
- Weak social protection;
- Migration-related vulnerability.
The growth of a care platform is not evidence that the care economy has matured.
A mature care economy would professionalise the worker as well as organise the booking. That is why pink-collar skilling must include the employers and organisations designing care jobs. Training women to provide a higher standard of care while leaving wages, schedules and grievance systems unchanged improves the service without necessarily improving the career.
Care cannot become valuable only after someone buys it
There is a paradox in the emerging market.
A family caregiver may perform highly demanding work without pay or formal recognition. The moment an agency supplies someone to do the same work, it becomes an economic service.
Commercialisation can make care visible. It should not become the only route through which care gains value. Unpaid caregivers need:
- Respite services;
- Income and social protection in appropriate circumstances;
- Flexible work;
- Access to training and information;
- Healthcare and mental-health support;
- Pension recognition;
- Affordable replacement care;
- A fairer division of responsibility within the family.
The objective is not to convert every human relationship into a transaction. It is to stop using love as a reason why one person should bear unlimited labour without support.
The care economy is not automatically a women’s opportunity
Care-sector expansion is often promoted as a major source of jobs for women. It can be.
Women already possess experience and form much of the existing workforce. Better training and formalisation can raise income and mobility. But a strategy that channels women into care while men dominate higher-paid sectors can reinforce occupational segregation.
Care needs more men.
Male childcare workers, nurses, eldercare professionals, teachers and community workers can help challenge the idea that care is female instinct rather than learned, skilled work.
Greater male participation would also make care professions more representative of the people they serve. The goal should be to expand choice:
- Women should be able to enter engineering, manufacturing and technology;
- Men should be able to enter care without stigma;
- Every care worker should receive professional recognition and fair pay.
A healthy care economy is not one in which more women care for everyone else. It is one in which care is more equally shared and better supported.
Businesses have discovered that care affects retention
For years, companies treated caregiving as an employee’s private challenge. The impact entered the workplace anyway. Employees declined relocation, reduced hours, missed shifts, left jobs or rejected leadership roles because care arrangements could not accommodate the demands.
The employer saw attrition. The worker experienced a care-system failure.
Business interest is now growing in childcare support, eldercare referrals, paid care leave, flexibility and return-to-work programmes. The ILO’s work on workplace care policies argues that such measures can strengthen recruitment, productivity and retention when they are designed around employees’ actual needs.
The strongest organisations will move beyond one parental benefit. They will examine the whole workforce life cycle:
- Pregnancy and new parenthood;
- Childcare across different ages;
- Support for children with disabilities;
- Sudden family illness;
- Eldercare;
- Long-term care;
- Bereavement;
- Return after extended leave.
Care is not one life stage. Nor is it experienced only by women.
What would a serious care economy policy contain?
The care economy has gained visibility. The next phase requires design.
A national assessment of care needs
Governments need to know who requires care, what families currently provide, where services are absent and how demand will change with ageing and migration.
Regular time-use data
Employment statistics cannot explain care inequality on their own. Time-use surveys should be conducted frequently enough to show whether policies are reducing women’s unpaid workload.
Universal and affordable services
Childcare, eldercare, disability support and community health cannot depend entirely on household income.
Public provision, regulated private services and social enterprises can work together, but access must not be reserved for affluent families.
Decent work standards
Care workers need contracts, wage floors, rest, occupational safety, social protection, training, grievance systems and freedom from harassment.
Professional career ladders
A caregiver should be able to progress into specialised care, assessment, supervision, training, management or entrepreneurship.
Recognition of unpaid caregivers
Respite, care credits, pension support and accessible services can prevent family caregivers from becoming economically invisible.
Better urban and rural infrastructure
Water, sanitation, transport, safe housing and nearby services reduce the time consumed by care.
Shared responsibility
Parental and care leave must make it normal for men to participate. Policy should not merely help women handle the same unequal arrangement more efficiently.
Worker and caregiver representation
People giving and receiving care must have a voice in the policies and business models built around them.
That is the difference between a care market and a care system. A market responds to demand that can pay. A system responds to human need.
How should care investment be measured?
The number of centres opened is useful. It is not enough. A stronger scorecard would ask:
- Is quality care available within a practical distance?
- Can low- and middle-income households afford it?
- Did women’s unpaid care time decline?
- Did more women enter or remain in employment?
- Are men providing a larger share of household care?
- Did care workers’ wages and social protection improve?
- Are services accessible to people with disabilities?
- Are rural areas covered?
- Do workers remain in the sector?
- Are care recipients safe and satisfied?
- Can caregivers obtain respite?
- Are private providers regulated effectively?
Care policy should improve the lives of three groups at once:
- the person receiving care;
- the person providing it;
- the family organising and financing it.
A system that helps one by exhausting another is not sustainable.
The risk of turning care into another low-wage growth sector
The care economy’s new visibility has produced excitement. It promises jobs, entrepreneurship, women’s employment, social impact and technology-led services.
Those opportunities are real. So is the danger that care becomes the next large sector built around informal female labour.
- A government may count jobs without asking whether they pay enough.
- A start-up may claim inclusion while classifying caregivers as partners with few protections.
- A family may purchase affordable care because the worker’s wage is kept low.
- An investor may see an ageing population as a market while overlooking the people delivering the daily service.
Care is unusually vulnerable to undervaluation because its highest-quality features are difficult to count. Patience, trust, observation, continuity and emotional presence do not fit neatly into a productivity dashboard.
An efficient care service cannot simply mean more people cared for in less time. Human attention is not always a cost to be engineered away.
Care is also climate and crisis infrastructure
The care economy is increasingly relevant to resilience.
Floods, heat, conflict, disease outbreaks and displacement create additional care needs. Children, older people, pregnant women, people with disabilities and those with chronic conditions often face greater risk. At the same time, the people providing unpaid and community care may lose income, transport, and access to public services.
A resilient society therefore requires:
- Functioning health and care services during emergencies;
- Trained community workers;
- Continuity of medication and support;
- Accessible evacuation plans;
- Temporary childcare and safe spaces;
- Social protection for caregivers;
- Public investment before the crisis arrives.
The ILO now places care alongside recovery, peace and institutional trust rather than treating it as a secondary social service. The evolution is significant.
Care began as labour economic statistics did not see. It is becoming part of how societies understand their ability to survive disruption.
Why the journey of care work is not complete
Care has moved remarkably far in the language of global policy. It appears in United Nations resolutions, labour standards, gender strategies, workforce plans and investment discussions. Yet everyday arrangements remain familiar.
Women still provide most unpaid care. Domestic and care workers remain underprotected. Parents struggle to find affordable childcare. Older people depend heavily on daughters and daughters-in-law. Employers continue to treat care-related exits as individual choices.
Recognition can create the impression that progress has already occurred.
- A government may celebrate the care economy while underfunding public services.
- A company may offer flexibility while penalising employees who use it.
- A platform may formalise bookings while keeping workers informal.
- A society may praise caregivers while refusing to pay them properly.
Care has become visible enough to admire. It is not yet valued enough to transform.
The Change Ahead
For most of history, care entered public attention when something went wrong.
A woman left her job; a hospital ran short of nurses; a family could not manage an ageing parent; a childcare centre closed; a pandemic interrupted everyday life.
The language is changing because the evidence has become overwhelming.
Care creates human capability. It enables employment; it sustains health; it prepares children for the future and helps older people live with dignity. And it can generate millions of jobs and strengthen economies during periods of demographic and social change.
But the care economy should not be celebrated merely because investors and governments have discovered its size. Its progress will be measured through a different set of questions.
- Did women get some of their time back?
- Did men take on more responsibility?
- Did families gain dependable services?
- Did care workers receive better wages and rights?
- Did older and disabled people gain greater dignity and choice?
- Did public budgets begin to reflect the value policy speeches now assign to care?
The world did not suddenly become dependent on care. It finally began to admit that it always was. That admission can reshape economies, workplaces and families. Only investment, redistribution and decent work will turn it into change.
Editorial Note and Sources
This article traces broad developments in the global policy treatment of paid and unpaid care. It draws on international labour standards, United Nations policy papers, gender-equality frameworks and current research. Estimates of the size of the care workforce and potential employment creation depend on definitions, datasets and investment scenarios. The “care economy” includes diverse sectors and employment arrangements; conditions should not be assumed to be uniform across countries or occupations.
Principal sources
- International Labour Organisation: Resolution concerning decent work and the care economy, adopted in June 2024.
- International Labour Organisation: Care economy definition, research and policy resources.
- International Labour Organisation: Advancing decent work and the care economy.
- United Nations Sustainable Development Group: Transforming Care Systems: UN System Policy Paper.
- United Nations General Assembly: Resolution establishing the International Day of Care and Support.
- UN Women: Evidence on care investment, women’s economic participation and potential job creation.
- International Labour Organisation: Global estimates of women outside the labour force because of unpaid care responsibilities.
- World Bank: Gender Strategy 2024–30 and current work on childcare, employment and care enterprises.
