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Are Women Not ‘Working’? Interactions between Childcare and Women’s Economic Engagement

This paper seeks to examine how childcare impacts upon women’s economic engagement in India, Nepal, Tanzania, and Rwanda. In delineating the linkages between childcare, paid work, and other tasks that women carry out within and outside the house, this paper privileges women’s own perceptions of childcare as ‘work’, and the extent to which they see this as a tension between women’s caregiving role and their income-generating role.

Introduction: Contentious Women’s Empowerment in South Asia

Questions of women's power remain a matter of heated debate globally, but take on a heightened intensity in a South Asia featuring...

Women’s Economic Engagement and Childcare: Moving from Survival to a ‘Triple Boon’

Published by: IDS

Women’s childcare responsibilities are often seen as a barrier to them undertaking paid work. However, this is a two-way interaction, mediated by large quantities of unpaid work. Women thus find themselves in a downward spiral of a ‘triple burden’ consisting of (a) time‑consuming, yet unpaid work with no economic returns to them; (b) informal and back‑breaking low-paid work; and (c) supervisory childcare and domestic tasks like cooking, cleaning, and fetching water and fuel.