Thank you for inviting me to speak on this timely topic of women's unpaid work. I am speaking as the Canada research chair and project director of a new seven-year partnership grant funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. This grant is focused on policies, especially child care, parental leave and employment policies that support families' paid and unpaid work.
I am pleased to say that three of our grant partners are here today, Women and Gender Equality Canada, Statistics Canada and the Vanier Institute of the Family.
My short remarks are also informed by my 25 years of research on caregiving fathers and my methodological writing on how we measure unpaid care work.
I frame my remarks around what British feminist economist Diane Elson calls the three Rs for analyzing unpaid work: recognize, reduce and redistribute.
I will turn now to recognize. We recognize that care and the care economy underpins and makes possible the so-called real or essential economy. We recognize that our economy, in the words of my colleague Nancy Folbre, is actually taking a free ride on the care economy. Society gets a pass while women, especially mothers, take on the work and the costs of care. We recognize that care is a human, not a female, capacity. Men's involvement in care can be transformative for men, for families and for societies. We recognize the extraordinarily high socio-economic value of unpaid care work and the high economic value of investing in high-quality paid care work, including elder care and child care.
The economic benefits of investing in child care are well detailed in recent studies from the U.K. Women's Budget Group and from Jim Stanford of the Centre for Future Work. These economic benefits include, for example, direct and indirect job creation, increased tax dollars and increased GDP.
That brings me to my second point, reduce. How does one reduce unpaid work? In the global north, including Canada, a key social infrastructure to reduce women's unpaid work and to facilitate their paid work is child care. As well said in the recent throne speech, the time is now for significant, long-term, sustained investment in high-quality, affordable, accessible child care.
I will turn now to redistribute. A 2019 report by the International Labour Organization on unpaid care work analyzed time use surveys from 23 countries around the globe, including Canada. They concluded, “Across the world, without exception, women carry out three-quarters of unpaid care work, or more than 75 per cent of the total hours provided.... There is no country where women and men perform an equal share of unpaid care work.”
To redistribute unpaid work, there are at least two things to consider. First, how do we support father's involvement in unpaid work? One important argument repeatedly made by parental leave scholars, including myself, is that fathers' take-up of parental leave is a lever for gender change in paid and unpaid work. Just as the federal government is looking to the Province of Quebec for lessons on child care, we should look to Quebec for lessons on policy design that will support more fathers taking parental or paternity leave. I am happy to discuss this more in the question period.
A second point about redistributing unpaid work is how to measure it. The 1995 Beijing platform for action called upon countries to make visible and to measure unpaid work through time use studies. However, time use studies can only go so far in measuring unpaid work. They measure care and housework tasks, but they do not measure responsibilities for unpaid work. As I have argued for 25 years, it is the responsibilities for unpaid work that are extremely difficult to shift.
We need stronger methodological tools for measuring the responsibilities for unpaid work, for example, combining time use diaries with qualitative research on people's stories about how they use time and live time, or time diaries that include open-ended questions that tap into socio-cultural norms that underpin gendered responsibilities for unpaid work. We also need disaggregated data so that we can track diversity, equity and inclusion in unpaid work.
To conclude, according to the ILO, it will take around 210 years to close the gender gap in unpaid care work. The time to act is now.
Canada has been a leader on gender equality. It needs to act now on child care and parental leave. We need more and stronger data, and we need to harness that data in policy development.
Thank you.