The problem that has no name - work, care and time

How the distribution of time reflects and reinforces inequality

It is fifty years since the American author Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. This game-changing book helped to launch 'second wave feminism', or the women's liberation movement, which raged through the late 1960s and 1970s. It exposed what Friedan called 'the problem that has no name': something invisible, yet painfully experienced. Women felt obliterated by an unquestioned division of labour and purpose, which they had not chosen and could not control.

Fifty years on, there's a different, but closely related, problem. It is not so much enforced joblessness and domesticity that afflict women today, as the combined pressures of paid work and caring. The root of the problem remains the same: under-valued responsibilities and stifled opportunities, locked in place by the gendered distribution of labour.

Pressures of paid work and care

These days, unlike the early 1960s, women are expected to go out to work and bring home a wage. However, they must do so in ways that interfere as little as possible with, first, caring for children and, later, caring for ailing parents - and even both at once. This traps many women in low-paid, low-status employment, often because they opt for so-called 'part-time' jobs.¹ While their children are young or when an elderly parent can no longer cope alone, women often leave the labour market for a few years, losing contacts, confidence and prospects, so that when they return to paid work they are at an even greater disadvantage. This may appear to make economic sense if they are earning less than their male partner, which is still the prevailing pattern. But there is more than money at stake: there is also power, identity, capabilities and relationships. Being trapped at the low end of the job market robs women of opportunities to branch out, earn more and develop their full potential. Being the 'breadwinner' remains a strong marker of masculinity, but cuts men off from important swathes of family experience.² Inequalities between parents can breed resentment and conflict at home. Women and men rarely choose to live this way but are driven to it by force of custom and expectation.

What's happening now is that these patterns are intensifying relentlessly. In the last few years, women have come under more pressure than ever to go out to work. Meanwhile, there are growing numbers of frail and disabled parents who, thanks to modern medicine, are living to be much older, but with diminishing health and self-sufficiency in the extra years: most are cared for by their daughters or daughters-in-law. And, although there is more childcare available since the turn of the century, there is nowhere near enough high-quality, affordable care, for children or adults, to cover the time spent in paid work by those who have caring responsibilities.

Women make up the vast majority of paid carers too. Most caring work, beyond schools and hospitals, is in the hands of non-government, mainly for-profit businesses, which offer less employment protection than public sector organisations. Front-line jobs in both childcare and adult social care are low-paid and low status, with little in the way of skills development, career progression or security, and poor working conditions. In adult social care, the work is often based on zero-hours contracts (where the employer decides how much work - if any - is to be done by a worker at any time) and extensive unpaid travel. Rising demand for paid-for care is failing to drive up wages or encourage employers to improve working conditions, because there's a steady supply, especially in recessionary times, of this kind of labour, for which minimal qualifications are thought to be necessary.

Policy discussions about care tend to focus on how to make it more plentiful, affordable and distributed more evenly across the country; finding the best form of government subsidy - vouchers or tax relief for parents, or state funding directly to providers - and working out the...