Care Work

Care work refers to the labor associated with meeting the physical, emotional, and developmental needs of others. Care work takes place in homes (e.g., the care of children or elders) and in institutional settings such as nursing homes, childcare centers, schools, and hospitals. Care work can be paid or unpaid, and is carried out by professionals, paraprofessionals, low-skilled laborers, or—in the case of unpaid care—friends and family. Generally speaking, paid and unpaid care are socially undervalued and are poorly remunerated in the United States, despite the ongoing needs of children and aging adults for high-quality care.

Whether care is unpaid or paid, women constitute the vast majority of caregivers in the U.S. context. Informal care of family in the home (unpaid care) remains the purview of women, despite the increased participation of women in the paid labor force. Paid care work is similarly feminized, whether the work is low-skilled, semi-skilled, or highly skilled. For example, the vast majority of nursing aides and childcare workers are women (low-skilled), as are K–12 teachers, nurses, social workers, and clinical psychologists (semi- to highly skilled). Care work can therefore be considered a gendered form of labor. Women and men of color are disproportionately represented among paid caregivers, depending on how care work is defined. As Mignon Duffy argues, there is a hierarchy of care that relates directly to who provides care in our society and how/whether they are compensated. White women, for example, are found in high-skilled nurturing work—such as clinical psychology, nursing, and teaching—whereas women of color increasingly provide a disproportionate amount of low-skilled caring work, such as personal care or child care. When the definition of care work is expanded to include non-nurturing care work, such as janitorial work or foodservice preparation, men—notably men of color—are found in far greater numbers.

The fact that women provide the bulk of nurturing care work in society leads to the question of whether women possess a unique ethic of care that predisposes them to take on caring obligations, or whether women are relegated to caring work because of the forces of primary and secondary socialization, as well as limited opportunities in the paid workforce. As the literature on care work suggests, both are true. As scholars like Emily Abel and Margaret Nelson have argued, it is crucial to identify the ways that women are constrained by caregiving, while also recognizing that women construct self and identity through their caring obligations. Furthermore, given the important role that women play in the social reproduction of families (and, by extension, workers), it is not simply the fact that women provide the bulk of care that is the problem per se, but that this labor goes unrecognized and unrewarded by society.