Breathe
By Martha Herrera
In a country where women spend three times more time than men on caregiving tasks and where the economic value of this unpaid work is equivalent to almost 30% of the national GDP, a crucial question arises: who takes care of the caregiver?
We all have the right to care, which means the right to care, to be cared for and to self-care. This right is guaranteed through the set of daily management and sustainability activities that are carried out inside or outside the home and allow for physical, biological and emotional wellbeing. Care is an activity that involves understanding and attending to people who are unable to meet all or part of their physical, emotional and/or affective needs.
Based on the above, I would like to highlight three reflections. First, the organization of care is a gender issue because it disproportionately affects women's well-being and possibilities for social mobility. Disparities in the area of care have a profound impact on women's lives, on our autonomy and well-being, and on the economic opportunities we can access. The latest National Household Income and Expenditure Survey (ENIGH, 2020) reveals that for every 100 hours women spend on unpaid care work, men spend only 40.
Second, this imbalance places a disproportionate burden on us, who spend up to 6 hours a day on these vital tasks. In addition, women in the care industry face obstacles in the labor market and are often trapped in precarious jobs.
Nancy Fraser , a renowned feminist theorist, argues that care work constitutes a "hidden economy" that is not accounted for in traditional metrics of economic growth. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI, 2020), if unpaid domestic and care work in Mexico were valued economically, it would represent a value equivalent to 6.4 trillion pesos, comparable to that of the construction and mining sectors combined.
And third, recognizing that societies require care and that caregivers are outside social security and protection schemes is crucial to reducing inequalities and promoting social mobility. This highlights the pressing need to recognize and value care work, transforming our economies and proposing new solutions to address inequalities and poverty in pursuit of sustainable growth and development.
In this context, Mercedes D'Alessandro proposes to rethink the approach to care as a responsibility shared by families, companies, organizations and the public sector. We must denaturalize, defamiliarize and defeminize the burden historically imposed on women and allow each woman, from her freedom, autonomy and backed with support, to develop her life and reach her full potential.
But how do we move towards a care system that promotes women's social mobility? How do we ensure that the State fulfills its role as guarantor of care?
The first step, then, is to continue to promote this issue in the public debate, as some of our federal legislators and activists have already done, in favor of accounting for care work as an engine of well-being, competitiveness and social mobility for us women.
Therefore, we must promote fiscal policies and the financial resourcesrequired for the State to assume care as a strategic investment and support comprehensive care policies under a framework of predictability and citizen ownership, transcending the logic of services to focus on people and their rights, because betting on care is to build a path of opportunities and close gender gaps.
In this sense, we must continue adding and building alliances in this unpostponable work for a care infrastructure, it is imperative to design and implement strategies from the local level and from the bottom up, to transform the dynamics of the exercise of power and the ways in which we are politically linked without women having to be the superheroines who carry all the weight of care on our shoulders.
*Martha Herrera González is Secretary of Equality and Inclusion of the Government of Nuevo León and Coordinator of the Cabinet of Equality for All.
An activist with a passion for development and social transformation, she has postgraduate studies in various universities and institutes in Canada, the United States, Spain, France and Mexico.
For more than 35 years she has dedicated her professional career to development banking, intermediate organizations, the private and public sector.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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