‘We Are Conditioned To Believe Care Work Is Innate To Women’
In BehanBox Talkies, we explore ideas through the lens of scholars. In this installment, we interview economist Neetha N about how caste, patriarchy and capitalism devalue care work in India — and what the state must do
What does it mean to provide care, and who counts as a care worker? Even official definitions, which speak of goods and services essential for “sustaining individuals and households”, fall short in capturing the spectrum of labour essential for human survival. We see care everywhere — homes, institutions, market spaces — related to age, disability and illness. Some of it, done by say nurses and ASHA workers is paid but involves unsafe, devalued, and exploitative working conditions; some by homemakers and community mobilisers go unrecognised. Care and reproductive labour by its very nature involves multitasking and different levels of skills, and is responsible for 7.5% of the GDP.
Care is difficult and skilled labour that is valourised but we have been socially conditioned to disregard its value, says Neetha N, a scholar and economist at Centre for Women’s Development Studies. Patriarchy peddles it as women’s work, and caste shapes who does what care labour. But without urgent investment, the world faces a global care crisis with the most marginalised women hit hardest, so the State has to step in, Neetha tells Saumya Kalia in an interview. Edited excerpts:
What first drew you to the study of care work?
I came to Delhi in 1998 to work at the National Labour Institute (NLI). Every morning, I’d see a group of women coming to sign in at the gate and enter the apartments nearby for part-time domestic work. It was something I wasn’t used to. In Kerala, some homes had domestic workers but you wouldn’t see workers there in this kind of condition; because of the trade union movement and social movements there, there’s a certain dignity attached to any kind of work. But here, the women were stopped at the gate every day, made to sign, they were always running around. I was fascinated and also very troubled by the way they were treated. I kept wondering: what’s the system like here? How much do they earn? What kind of work are they doing?
At the NLI, I was asked to specialise in women and work, and later in 2000, I proposed a research project on domestic workers in Delhi. This was also the period when more women were entering domestic work, many migrating from rural areas, especially Bengali women, and [there was] an emerging trend of feminisation of paid care work. That research itself was very revealing. I started learning about the different systems — part-time, full-time, live-in, live-out — and realised there were almost no studies on domestic work in Delhi at the time. I spoke to more organisations and my interest in women and work grew. Domestic work became my entry into understanding care work more broadly.
Before arriving in Delhi, did you see examples of care work within your own family?
Yes absolutely. There were six of us, and my mother, a housewife, often found it difficult to manage all the housework and care. My father never helped her, he was a traditional husband, the kind who expected everything to be ready when he came home, food on the table, everything in place. We were two sisters, two years apart, and we used to feel irritated and agitated at the inequality we saw in our homes. My mother was working all the time, whereas my father had a lot of leisure. As children we both wondered why it is that only mothers had to do it all.
Slowly we also started to realise that no one saw the housework or carework women do at home. Everyone spoke of her as if she was not doing anything, whereas she was the one working the most – we hadn’t fully developed these questions but this inequality disturbed us. So we would pitch in to help my mother, but never the brothers – they were told it wasn’t their role. That gendered division of work was so clear.
You have written about how care is highly demanding work but the myth is that it is unskilled and innate to women. Can you explain why and how gender becomes a form of labour training?
This myth is very naturalised in our context because women are socialised to do it from a young age. In my home, no one objected to girls performing these tasks; when my younger brother was unwell, it was assumed that the women and girls would pitch in and take care, but a similar expectation was not put on men. It’s a repeated messaging that you have to do it, this is your work, this is women’s work, and this separation is reinforced over time. It has gone so deep into people’s minds that because all women are doing it without any complaints or concerns, there’s no skill in it.
Care is highly skilled work, not everyone can do it. Of course, people can be trained, but that doesn’t mean the work is unskilled. Yet societies and families and communities have always devalued it, treating it as if it’s no work at all.
What place does care work have in India’s cultural imagination?
It differs from location to location. In Delhi, people think of domestic workers because of how it has become part and parcel of every upper-middle and lower-middle class household. In rural areas, people may not always think of the identity of a care worker because this concept is very academic and technical, but if you explain to them, they will immediately talk about ASHA workers and Anganwadi workers.
A category people readily identify are nurses – they interpret ‘care’ in the literal sense, as something that is offered in hospital, in an institutional setup.
Missing here is the idea of unpaid care – what housewives do for their husbands or parents or children – it’s not very instinctive to most of us. In every family, there is a woman who will take care of all the housework and care work. If it is not one, then there will be another; the family will always find women within its system to do it. The government or capital doesn’t want to acknowledge the problems with that assumption of gendered families.
When you ask women about care work, especially as a form of labour or work, they don’t think of themselves as workers or of contributing to the family income. Care is seen as a family thing, and it is so personal, they don’t identify themselves as care workers.
We also see this with women in domestic work, textile industry, or other types of casualised work opportunities like platform work. Is it language or social conditioning?
Language is an issue but in most cases, it’s a result of the condition in which they have come to understand their care or housework. When we did time use surveys, women would trivialise their work, they don’t want to even look at these tasks as work; they would say women know what we do and didn’t feel the need to spell it out. You had to repeatedly ask. That is where the problem is. It’s been seen by women also as something which is not worthy of sharing. Of course, things are evolving — with more awareness and also with education — but it’s not a major change.
Also patriarchy and gender norms play a role. Women are not supposed to say ‘I’ve done this for my son’ or my daughter or husband, women’s work is to keep them happy and it’s not considered socially acceptable to talk about it.
The way we have the concept of care has in itself that affective and moral dimension. And that’s one reason why some feminist academicians now like to use, instead of care, social reproduction. Care is important for reproducing labour power, and it is so embedded in the economic system. This gets sidelined when we speak of ‘care’ which has more of a moral, affective tone to it and is a limiting concept in terms of understanding the labour involved. Social reproduction as a concept legitimises care as labour. It doesn’t see care as purely emotional and affective, it detaches from moral ideas to acknowledge other dimensions.
Care work is also often described as ‘invisible’.
Across different care sectors, you will see invisibility in the literal sense and invisibility in terms of how that work is valued. It’s not about just seeing a person but also about seeing what they do, how much time it takes, and what it is worth. Invisibility comes when the work happens inside homes, where people don’t consider them as contributing labour. This is an issue with domestic workers who work in individual, private homes where employers don’t talk about them as workers. Even when some forms of care work are visible, people don’t understand or appreciate the underlying skill. This is the case with women who are doing housework and care work, they don’t articulate it as work.
Care work is invisible even in economic frameworks. You’ve written about how time use surveys and other valuation instruments have a narrow view of care work, care givers and their relationships. Can you elaborate on that?
The moment we talk about ‘valuing’ care work, we turn to market tools like wages to measure work. But that kind of evaluation will always have problems: whose wages are you going to use in the evaluation exercise? The other method of valuation based on opportunity cost is also problematic. If I am an educated, highly skilled person, can my labour be valued more than someone who is an unlettered person, even if we are doing the same housework and care work?
All valuations get tricky because this work is happening in two different realms, the market and households. The market reflects the social understanding and skill that goes into each work and ends up reproducing those inequalities in its calculations. Since society devalues both housework and care work, the market ends up devaluing domestic workers’ [labour] also, which is why their wages are often lower than some informal sector workers.
You can never arrive at any calculation which will give a sense of what contribution women are making to this economy and society – either you overvalue it or you may devalue it. Valuations can be used for framing policies but I don’t think it moves the needle on care work or on highlighting issues of sharing or reducing care work.
What do you make of how courts have responded to this problem of valuing women’s care labour?
Court cases have valued women’s work either based on the time spent working or how their unpaid care enabled men to earn livelihoods, but there is no uniformity in any of these judgments.
Some have offered compensation amounts, not wages, to women for housework. Many state governments have also introduced this. The problem with this approach is these are small arbitrary amounts – there’s no reason why it should be Rs 1,500 or 2,000 – and disbursal is contingent upon when they announce it, say during elections. These may bring economic relief immediately but in the long run, they reinforce the existing labour market discriminations. If as feminists we are arguing for equal sharing of housework and care work, then these policies do not help much.
What role did India’s neoliberal reforms play in shaping care conversations?
Conversations about wages for housework were in many ways about valuing women’s contribution to the economy. The underlying idea was that men could participate in the labour market only because women sustained families through unpaid care. That’s where the concept of a ‘family wage’ came in, the idea that wages should be high enough to support the household and women should have access to benefits and state facilities.
Another argument also focused on women as mothers, in charge of taking care of children and their education. They were in that sense nurturing and reproducing the next generation who will be the labour for the capitalist system. If all of women’s work is contributing to the economy, to capitalist profit, there has to be more sharing of this profit.
Among feminist economists, the objective of these conversations was also to show that women’s contribution to the economy is substantial, and governments need to change macro policy to address women-specific questions, like providing access to clean water or other infrastructure requirements that will unburden or reduce the burden on women. The idea was to make a case for why the state should have a policy specific to women even though they are not in the formal GDP framework. We had to take this approach not entirely because of the market but the way the State’s role had changed after neoliberalism reforms.
Care work is often done by the most marginalised women. How does this decide who does care work and how that work is valued?
Social identities are central, especially in the context of domestic work, they come from the most marginalised communities – they’re poor, migrants, and from lower castes – which adds to their exploitation and invisibility. Even in the case of more formal care workers like nurses, who come from a wider range of backgrounds, there’s still a lack of recognition and invisibility in that sense. The care they perform in private hospitals and small clinics, is their work valued? This is a larger question of labour laws and how privatisation has deteriorated working conditions.
Caste also plays a big role in how care work is divided. You rarely see domestic workers from Dalit or Adivasi backgrounds doing certain tasks like cooking, they can only do cleaning work which is seen as physically demanding and culturally impure. Cooking also earns you higher wages in comparison to manual work like cleaning work, because one is considered skilled, the other not. These perceptions are shaped by caste-based understandings of who can do what. Even ASHA workers, Anganwadi workers and midwives can be seen as doing work – like going inside homes and travelling all the time – that society may not find acceptable for ‘good women’. Everything is connected.
You and others have written about ‘care drain’ and how emotional labour gets displaced in global care supply chains. Can you elaborate on the role of migration in the Indian context?
A lot of women migrated internally from rural to urban especially after the 1990s due to rural distress. Simultaneously, in urban areas there emerged an upwardly mobile middle class, increasingly employed in the service sector, which made it possible to hire cheap labour and in turn create a demand for domestic workers.
In those initial years, many women migrants who entered into domestic work never revealed their status in the city [back home] because their work – going to other homes and performing housework – is not socially accepted in rural areas. Even though they were earning, their work wasn’t socially accepted. Things have changed now, at least in Delhi, partly because wages are much higher now than what they used to be.
Many women also arrived as part of family migration, with the understanding that men will also find some job here. However men could only find casual, irregular work, so women had to take on the responsibility of supporting the family. This was a big thing, that family migration was dominated through the earnings of the women.
Now we’re seeing women’s singular migration also, especially as live-in domestic workers, as they migrate to cities and support their families back in villages. This is also what is happening in terms of international immigration.
What is the emotional cost of migration on women’s ability to provide care at home?
We speak about it, but the fact is, women need this money to provide basic necessities to their children – economic distress dominates their approach to child care. When you speak to them, many of them are actually happy they are able to support their education and send money.
But for women whose children are living with them in cities, there is constant anxiety. It’s not about lack of care that they can give but about safety. When I was studying domestic workers in Delhi in 2000, I went to Nizammudin, in a locality where many domestic workers lived, and I saw some children, all below six years of age, tied to unused railway tracks with a saree. The women said they couldn’t leave them alone at home and they couldn’t afford to skip work, but here, by tying them to this unused track, they can play and they won’t move beyond this.
Women find different ways to manage their childcare and other care demands. In some cases where domestic workers migrate or are unable to provide care at home, the eldest girl child is in charge of caring. Then what happens to that girl? Her education, freedom, understanding of leisure are all taken away. This entire cycle of care is very generational and influences gender empowerment.
Unpaid care work is seen as being beyond the scope of State intervention, the idea being that the home cannot be not a site of an economic transaction. What do you make of this?
Unpaid care work is more complex than market work. The labour that unfolds inside homes is more intense and deeply habitualised, you cannot decide whether or when to stop it, there’s no choice. In our context, it is also very clear that it is not about the work but how that work burdens women through a lack of agency in terms of how much to do, what to do, when to do. There are no choices for women. In the market if you don’t want to do a job, you can decide to leave and work elsewhere. But how many women can just leave the house and walk away?
You can only ensure safe and dignified work conditions through reasonable wages and working conditions; there have to be leave policies and some form of work regulations. Right now they are compelled to work in seven-eight homes and they are running from one house to another – there’s no regulation which adds to their burden of employment.
Scholars like Alyssa Battistoni note capitalism is disinterested in care work due to low profitability. Do you agree?
What does it mean to say the market ‘undervalues’ care work? Take nurses, the market is making a lot of money through hospitals yet nurses remain underpaid nurses’ work. That is also happening in schools: teachers are counted as care workers but on their backs private schools are making huge profits. So I don’t think the issue is whether capitalism can make profit from care – it is how the market perceives the skill involved in care work and who performs it. The assumption often is women are performing these roles so you don’t need to pay them fairly. If care work is going to be low paid, the system ensures it’s done by women from the most marginalised groups. The market knows how to use these existing social divisions — of gender, caste, class — to its advantage.
The market is also currently defining value and has also come to a point where it has access to cheap labour. Even in factory work, wages are kept low, not because the work lacks value, but no regulation compels them to pay more. This is the larger problem of how markets are not regulated that helps them escape accountability. Of course, the market may not be interested in certain sectors, like investing in creche systems, but that’s where the State has to pitch in. There are areas the private sector will never invest in unless forced to. The State has to tax capital, mobilise enough resources, and prioritise care at social and community level. But resources have to be marshalled, and the State will have to push back and use the market’s capacity to fund this infrastructure.
If you were to value care differently, what would that look like?
Valuing care is not about assigning numbers or wages – it’s about understanding how important care is for the society, how it keeps the social fabric together. Valuation here is about equal sharing, recognising housework and care work as central to the economy and for running everyone’s life. Care workers should be given importance, acknowledged and supported. It should also not be gendered, why should it be? If anyone can do it, then let us socialise everyone to do it.
And this is where the State can enter with policies like reducing, redestributing, and revaluing care work. The family is a site of patriarchal relations, that character has to be shaken, and no one can shake that except the State.
How do you understand care work and what does it look like for you? We would love to hear about your experiences of care work. Write to us at contact@behanbox.com.
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