Unpaid care work, worth $10.8 trillion globally, remains invisible in economic systems despite sustaining the workforce and corporate productivity. Investing in care infrastructure is essential for gender equality, higher female participation, and inclusive economic growth.
Unpaid care work produces $10.8 trillion in annual economic value. CSW70 called for care infrastructure investment. The corporate sector extracts this value daily and reports it nowhere.
The Invisible Subsidy That Runs the World
Unpaid care work generates an estimated $10.8 trillion in annual economic value globally, according to UN Women’s 2026 gender equality framework. This includes childcare, eldercare, cooking, cleaning, water collection, and the day-to-day management of household nutrition and health. The burden of this work falls disproportionately on women. Globally, women spend two and a half times more hours on unpaid care work than men, and in India, Goldman Sachs Research estimates this gap to be as high as eight times. In low income contexts where public care infrastructure is limited or absent, the burden is even greater.
Yet this $10.8 trillion remains largely invisible in formal economic systems. It does not appear in company revenues, cost structures, or social impact reporting. It is excluded from GDP calculations and from labour force statistics unless the same work is paid, at which point it is suddenly recognised as part of the formal economy despite being functionally identical. In effect, the global economy, including every corporation that has ever produced a CSR report, rests on this unaccounted foundation.
Workers are able to participate in the labour market because unpaid care work sustains households. Supply chains remain operational because women in communities uphold the social infrastructure that enables them. This is not rhetorical framing but an economic reality, one that has long been acknowledged in academic literature but remains largely absent from corporate social impact frameworks.
What CSW70 Said About Care Work
The CSW70 Agreed Conclusions, adopted in March 2026, included formal recognition of community justice workers and paralegals within national legal frameworks, and called for stronger protections for women’s rights at work. The G77 Ministerial Roundtable on sustainable financing for gender equality, held during CSW70, specifically listed care infrastructure as a priority investment area alongside digital inclusion and women’s economic empowerment. Financing care infrastructure was named as one of the concrete national actions needed to accelerate investment in gender equality.
The inclusion of care infrastructure in a ministerial outcome is significant because it represents a shift from treating care work as a welfare issue to treating it as an economic infrastructure issue. Countries with functioning public childcare systems, including France, Sweden, and Norway, have substantially higher female labour force participation rates than countries without them. The connection is direct and well-documented. Care infrastructure is not primarily about children. It is about who has the capacity to participate in the formal economy, and currently the answer is: women whose unpaid care responsibilities have been taken care of, either by the state, by market care services, or by other women.
What the Corporate Sector Does With This Information
Corporate CSR programmes have, in some cases, invested in crèche infrastructure near industrial zones. Tata Motors and Infosys have on-site childcare. Several multinationals operating in India have creche programmes at factory locations. These are genuine investments. They are also exceptions. The standard corporate approach to the care economy is to acknowledge it in gender equality policy statements and exclude it from operational investment decisions.
The business case for care infrastructure investment is well-established: companies that provide childcare and flexible work arrangements report higher female workforce retention, reduced recruitment costs, and improved productivity. The BRSR framework, which requires gender headcount disclosure, does not require disclosure of whether a company provides childcare, what it costs, or what proportion of female employees at different income levels can access it. The result is that care infrastructure investment remains in the category of “nice to have” corporate benefits rather than gender equality essentials that are measured, disclosed, and compared across the sector.
The Policy Gap
The CSW70 Agreed Conclusions call for governments to invest in care infrastructure and account for unpaid care work in national planning. These are not new calls. The Beijing Platform for Action of 1995 included language on the economic value of unpaid care work. Thirty years of international normative framework have produced some progress on paid parental leave policies and a handful of publicly funded childcare expansions, but nothing approaching the systemic investment the scale of the problem requires.
What would systemic investment look like? The IMF has estimated that public investment in care infrastructure, including childcare and eldercare services, could significantly increase female labour force participation and economic output in both developed and developing economies. The fiscal return on care investment, through increased tax revenue from women’s earnings and reduced social costs, is positive over a medium-term horizon. This is not a radical policy position. It is mainstream development economics. The political will to act on it remains limited because care work is feminised, and feminised work has historically been treated as economically peripheral even when it is economically central.
Conclusion
The $10.8 trillion care economy is the largest unaccounted asset in the global gender equality balance sheet. Corporations that extract value from this asset through the daily labour of their workers’ household members, without investment in the infrastructure that would make that labour more equitably distributed, are not gender-neutral. They are beneficiaries of a subsidy they have not earned and do not report. CSW70’s inclusion of care infrastructure financing in its outcome documents represents normative progress. Converting that progress into budget lines, board-level investment decisions, and corporate policy changes is the next step. It is also a step that has not been taken for thirty years.
References:
1. UN Women (2026). Gender Equality Framework 2026. https://www.unwomen.org/en/newsstories/media-advisory/2026/02/iwd2026-and-csw70
2. UN Women (2026, March 9). CSW70 Agreed Conclusions. https://www.unwomen.org/en/newsstories/press-release/2026/03/csw70-conclusions
3. Columbia Climate School (2024). How Can ESG Support Female Leadership? https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2024/05/08/how-can-esg-support-female-leadership/
4. Goldman Sachs Research (2025). The Economic Opportunity of India’s Women Workers. https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/the-economic-opportunity-of-indias-women-workers
Clear Cut Gender, CSR Desk
New Delhi, UPDATED: April 06, 2026 05:35 IST
Written By: Jay
