What Counts as Care Work

For most of the twentieth century, standard economic accounts treated the household as a black box. What happened inside it — meals prepared, children tended, laundry folded, elderly parents bathed, a spouse's bad day absorbed and managed — appeared in no statistical series, generated no GDP entry, and was attributed to no sector. And yet the activities that went on there were, and remain, a substantial share of the labor that keeps societies functioning. Sociologists and feminist economists have spent decades bringing this work into visibility, developing the category of care work to name a class of activity that is heterogeneous in form but coherent in function: the labor that produces and sustains human beings (Folbre 2001, pp. 22-27).

Care work, in the standard analytic usage, has three interrelated senses. First, direct personal care: feeding, bathing, dressing, comforting, supervising — the hands-on work of tending to bodies that cannot fully tend to themselves, whether those of infants, sick adults, disabled people, or frail elders. Second, indirect care or household reproduction: cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, household administration — the labor that maintains the physical and logistical conditions under which people eat, sleep, and show up for school or work the next day. Third, emotional and relational labor: listening, encouraging, mediating conflicts, remembering birthdays, managing moods and transitions — the often-invisible work of sustaining the social relationships that families and households depend on (England 2005, pp. 381-385).

Some of this work is paid: child-care workers in day care centers, home health aides, nurses, domestic workers, teachers in the early grades, nursing-home staff. Some is unpaid: the same activities done for one's own family or community. The distinction between paid and unpaid care is not a distinction in content — the tasks overlap substantially — but a distinction in social relation: who is doing it for whom and under what institutional arrangement (Duffy 2011, pp. 3-10).

Three sociological observations frame the analysis of care work. The first is that care work is heavily gendered. Across virtually every society for which reliable time-use data exist, women do substantially more unpaid care and domestic labor than men, and paid care work is disproportionately performed by women. Second, care work is racialized and classed. In stratified societies, the allocation of paid care labor follows lines of race and class: in the United States, disproportionately women of color and immigrant women; in the Gulf States, predominantly South and Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers; in European countries, increasingly women from Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Philippines (Glenn 1992, pp. 1-15; Romero 1992, pp. 72-85).

Third, and perhaps most consequential for the discipline's broader claims, care work is undervalued. When paid, it tends to be paid poorly relative to jobs requiring comparable skill and training. When unpaid, it is invisible in economic statistics despite being essential to what economists somewhat euphemistically call social reproduction — the day-to-day and generation-to-generation regeneration of the workforce that the formal economy treats as a given (Bhattacharya 2017, pp. 1-7; Folbre 2001, pp. 51-58).

The sociological question is not whether care work is important — it manifestly is — but how its distribution across gender, race, class, and nation is produced, maintained, and potentially changed. Nancy Folbre's image of the invisible heart captures the stakes: alongside Adam Smith's invisible hand of market coordination, societies depend on a largely uncompensated web of caring labor without which the market economy would collapse (Folbre 2001, pp. 3-5). The work is invisible not because it is unimportant but because our accounting systems and our cultural vocabularies were built to see other things. Bringing care work into focus is not a supplementary topic for family sociology; it is a reworking of the basic map of what counts as labor and who does it.