Gender Equality
  • 5.1.1 Whether or not legal frameworks are in place to promote, enforce and monitor equality and non‑discrimination on the basis of sex
  • 5.1.2 Women’s earnings as a percentage of men’s earning
  • 5.2.1 Proportion of ever-partnered women and girls aged 15 years and older subjected to physical, sexual or psychological violence by a current or former intimate partner in the previous 12 months, by form of violence and by age
  • 5.2.2 Proportion of women and girls aged 15 years and older subjected to sexual violence by persons other than an intimate partner in the previous 12 months, by age and place of occurrence
  • 5.3.1 Proportion of women aged 20–24 years who were married or in a union before age 15 and before age 18
  • 5.3.2 Proportion of girls and women aged 15–49 years who have undergone female genital mutilation/cutting, by age
  • 5.4.1 Proportion of time spent on unpaid domestic and care work, by sex, age and location
  • 5.5.1 Proportion of seats held by women in (a) national parliaments and (b) local governments
  • 5.5.2 Proportion of women in managerial positions
  • 5.6.1 Proportion of women aged 15–49 years who make their own informed decisions regarding sexual relations, contraceptive use and reproductive health care
  • 5.6.2 Number of countries with laws and regulations that guarantee full and equal access to women and men aged 15 years and older to sexual and reproductive health care, information and education
  • 5.a.1 (a) Proportion of total agricultural population with ownership or secure rights over agricultural land, by sex; and (b) share of women among owners or rights-bearers of agricultural land, by type of tenure
  • 5.a.2 Proportion of countries where the legal framework (including customary law) guarantees women’s equal rights to land ownership and/or control
  • 5.b.1 Proportion of individuals who own a mobile telephone, by sex
  • 5.c.1 Proportion of countries with systems to track and make public allocations for gender equality and women’s empowerment

    • 5.4.1 Proportion of time spent on unpaid domestic and care work, by sex, age and location

     

    The Care Economy

    The care economy is an integral sector that contributes to an economy by providing care and services necessary for the health and wellbeing of the current population and facilitating the reproduction of future populations. Care activities broadly fall under eldercare and childcare but also include education, healthcare, and personal social and domestic services. The healthcare sector of the care economy has gained a lot of visibility due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Occupations in this sector include but are not limited to healthcare practitioners and related technical occupations and healthcare support occupations. An issue of concern for most healthcare support occupations is low pay. Yet, most care-related activities are invisible and therefore are undervalued and in many cases unpaid. What this means is that care activities such as looking after aging parents, feeding and bathing infants, supervising children while they play, household chores such as cleaning and laundry are in fact services that do not receive payment and are not considered as part of national production. In other words, though the care economy should include all of these productive activities that members of society perform, they are currently not accounted for. According to the American Time Use Survey (2019) on average, women and men spend about 2.16 and 1.39 hours engaged in household activities such as food preparation and cleanup, interior cleaning, and laundry respectively. The same survey finds that mothers and fathers with children under the age of 6 on average spend about 2.75  and 1.42 hours a day respectively, caring for and helping household children. These figures not only highlight the substantial proportion of time spent in unpaid care activities but also the gender disparity in time devoted to care-related activities. The feminization of care activities perpetuates this inequality in sharing the care workload in the household. These attitudes may carry over to the paid care sector, especially when determining wages for domestic workers who are usually immigrants and women. In extreme cases, these outmoded gender-biased attitudes may play into extremely harmful practices such as human trafficking.

    Due to the lack of nationwide regulation or international labor standards that protect immigrant and care and domestic workers, these groups are particularly vulnerable to human trafficking including sexual harassment, wage theft, and other forms of discrimination. Human trafficking occurs when an employer uses force, fraud, or coercion to maintain control over the worker, and the worker is made to believe that they have no choice but to continue to work. Out of 1052, reported cases of labor-related human trafficking to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, 202 were related to domestic work. Immigrant domestic workers are most vulnerable to all three kinds of controlling behavior(force, fraud, and coercion) since in many cases these workers have temporary visas or are illegal immigrants and fear deportation. Furthermore, US national labor laws do not protect domestic workers and immigrant workers. Therefore these workers are excluded from federal laws governing overtime pay, a safe work environment, workplace discrimination, and collective bargaining rights. Finally, domestic workers face the challenge of isolation. Working in isolation impedes their ability to share information and grievances, and most importantly to organize for worker rights activism.