Press release: New UN Women report puts forth policy agenda to advance the care economy in the Arab States

Cairo, 7 December 2020 - While women’s rights have advanced over the past decades, women continue to play a disproportionate role in the care economy across the Arab States, performing on average 4.7 times more unpaid care work than men – the highest female-to-male ratio anywhere in the world, according to UN Women’s new flagship report, “Progress of Women in the Arab States 2020: The role of the care economy in promoting gender equality” published today.

“As COVID-19 has forced us to review our approaches, we now have a chance to build back better by making sustained investments in the care economy and reducing long-standing gender inequalities by valuing, supporting, and equally sharing care work,” said UN Women Arab States Regional Director, Susanne Mikhail Eldhagen. “Investments in social protection and care services can drive economic recovery by stimulating aggregate demand, creating employment in people-centered sectors and opening up training as well as employment opportunities for women and men who have lost their jobs as a result of the crisis.”

“The expansion of paid care services can be an important tool to shift the burden of care work and to empower women economically. In particular, national care strategies should expand early childhood care and education and start to plan for a range of long-term care options for the elderly,” said Prof. Ragui Assaad, Research Fellow of the Economic Research Forum.

“Sweden attaches great importance to our partnership with UN Women, the International Labour Organization and with countries in the region on promoting employment and decent work for women. Women’s participation in all aspects of society is smart economics. The COVID-19 crisis offers a unique opportunity for all of us to prioritize women and girls to build back better to sustainable and inclusive economies,” said Alexandra Rydmark, Ambassador of Sweden to Jordan.

“Unpaid care work has been largely invisible in economic calculations, and political discourse. The unequal distribution of unpaid care work is rooted in persistent gender roles and stereotypes about ‘women’s work’ and ‘men’s work’. Achieving shared responsibility for unpaid care work requires awareness-raising and changes in gender roles for both women and men,” said Paul Garnier, Ambassador of Switzerland to Egypt. “The report showed that women bear the larger burden of unpaid care work in the region, if women are to have equal access and opportunities in the labour market, unpaid care work has to be acknowledged, and governments have to put it in consideration,” he added.

Anchored in regional data and innovative analysis, the report includes policy briefs for the Arab States region, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and Tunisia. It shows how unpaid care work remains one of the greatest barriers to women’s participation in the labour force in the Arab States and how the paid care sector is a major employer for women and has the potential to power overall economic growth across the region.

According to the report, even when women have paid employment outside the home, they spend the same amount of time in unpaid care as women who are not employed. This “double shift” discourages women from engaging in paid work outside the home. Recognizing this often-overlooked value of women’s unpaid care work in the Arab States is critical to bringing the care economy higher up on the policy agenda. 

The report also sheds light on how the COVID-19 crisis has exposed persistent gender gaps in care policies and services across the Arab States region. Emerging evidence indicates that unpaid care responsibilities have increased during the pandemic, falling mostly on women. In this regard, the report calls on governments to establish a more comprehensive approach to the care economy post-COVID-19 including: expanding social protection systems to cover both employed women and men in the formal and informal sectors, establishing more flexible care and leave options, and institutionalizing flexible working arrangements.

Produced by UN Women in collaboration with the Economic Research Forum as a regional companion to UN Women’s report “Progress of the World’s Women 2019-2020: Families in a Changing World,” this study is funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.

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The Regional Report and policy briefs for the Arab States, Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia and Palestine can be found here.

Media contacts:

diego.delarosa[at]unwomen.org

nourhan.elnagdy[at]unwomen.org