“Why caregiving sustains economies but leaves women exposed in midlife and retirement?”
Unpaid Caregiving as Foundational Economic Infrastructure
Unpaid caregiving is not ancillary to economic life it is the very infrastructure that sustains formal labor markets and underpins economic productivity. Without the daily labor of unpaid caregivers predominantly women the cost of child-rearing, elder-care, and household maintenance would fall on governments and markets, or simply go undone. Yet, despite this indispensable economic role, unpaid caregivers are systematically excluded from financial recognition, social protection, and retirement security.
In human capital language, Maria and women like her are rational economic agents whose contributions increase the productive capacity of nations, yet their labor remains unremunerated and invisible within national accounts and pension systems. This leaves a critical question unaddressed: What is the liability of a state that leverages an invisible workforce, only to abandon it in old age?
Global Market Value of Care Work Roles (Paid Equivalents)
| Role (Paid Equivalent) | Indicative Annual Value (Cross-Country Benchmark | sources |
| Childcare Worker / Nanny | $20,000 - $35,000 | https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/care-economy/lang--en/index.htm |
| Household / Domestic Worker | $18,000- $30,000 | https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/domestic-workers/lang--en/index.htm |
| Home Health / Care Nurse | $30,000 - $60,000 | https://www.oecd.org/health/health-data.htm |
| Fodd Preparation / Household Provider | $25,000 - $50,000 | https://www.bls.gov/ooh/ |
Note: These figures represent conservative annual market benchmarks derived from cross-country labor data published by the ILO, OECD, and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. They do not constitute official global averages but are used to illustrate the approximate market value of unpaid care work when benchmarked against formal labor markets. Actual wages vary widely by country, regulation, and skill level.
Aggregated across roles, the market cost of full-time care over several decades easily exceeds $3 million in present value terms yet Maria performs this work day in, day out, without formal recognition or compensation.
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When the “Invisible Workforce” Meets Hard Data
Once the numbers are placed on the table, the idea of unpaid care work as a marginal issue quickly falls apart.
Globally, an estimated 708 million women are currently outside the labor force because they are providing unpaid care looking after children, aging parents, sick family members, and households (International Labour Organization, 2024). This is not a temporary pause in employment or a lifestyle choice; it is a structural barrier to economic participation that remains overwhelmingly gendered and remarkably persistent across regions and income levels.
The imbalance becomes even clearer when time is measured. Women perform nearly three-quarters of all unpaid care work worldwide, spending on average more than four hours each day on tasks that sustain families and communities. Men, by comparison, contribute far fewer hours to this essential labor (UN Women & ILO, 2024).
The gap is not about willingness it reflects how care responsibilities are socially assigned and economically ignored.
If this labor were formally measured and compensated, its scale would be impossible to dismiss. Estimates suggest unpaid care work would account for up to 9 percent of global GDP, placing it on par with some of the world’s largest industrial sectors (World Economic Forum, 2024). Yet unlike those sectors, care work remains absent from national accounts and largely excluded from social protection systems.
Put simply, the global economy runs on care that is neither counted as production nor protected as work. The consequence is not only statistical invisibility, but a lifetime of structural disadvantage for the women who provide it shaping their income, health, retirement security, and economic choices long after the caregiving years have passed.
When unpaid care is examined not as time spent, but as roles performed over a lifetime, the scale of what Maria actually does and what she ultimately loses comes sharply into focus.
The Household CEO: A Lifetime of Value, Declining Security
In a typical household shaped by lifelong caregiving, Maria is not performing a single role she is running an entire organization.
She acts as the Chief Strategy Officer, making long-term decisions about education, healthcare, and the future well-being of each family member. She becomes the Chief Financial Officer, managing limited resources, stretching income to cover complex needs, and ensuring that the household remains stable even when money is tight. As the Head of Human Resources, she mediates conflict, supports emotional health, nurtures growth, and keeps the family functioning as a cohesive unit. And every day, she operates as the Logistics Manager, coordinating schedules, appointments, school obligations, and the countless moving parts of daily life.
Overall, this is not informal help it is continuous executive-level labor sustained over decades. When measured at market rates, thirty years of this multi-layered work easily exceeds $3.2 million in economic value.
Yet when Maria reaches retirement age, the outcome is strikingly unequal. Her pension security if she qualifies for one at all is typically far lower than that of men. Across many developed economies, women’s pension benefits lag men’s by more than 25 percent on average (OECD, 2025). This gap is not the result of lower effort or productivity, but of employment histories shaped by caregiving years spent outside formal labor markets, part-time work undertaken to balance care, and the persistent undervaluation of time devoted to unpaid labor.
The contradiction is hard to ignore: the work that sustained households, enabled others to build careers, and reduced public care costs becomes the very reason Maria enters old age with less economic security.
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The Compensation That Was Promised but Never Designed
In any formal organization, someone who contributes at Maria’s level would not be expected to simply “age out” of the system. Long service is usually rewarded with structure and security: a pension that reflects years of contribution, health coverage that does not disappear when productivity slows, and mechanisms that smooth income across the later stages of life. These benefits are not generosity; they are part of the basic architecture of modern employment.
Maria, however, was never part of that architecture. Despite decades of work that sustained households, supported labor force participation, and reduced public care costs, her compensation at retirement looks markedly different. On average, women receive pension incomes 26 to 40 percent lower than men, if they receive a pension at all (OECD, 2025). The result is not merely a smaller monthly check, but a higher lifetime exposure to economic insecurity greater vulnerability to poverty, dependence, and difficult trade-offs between healthcare, housing, and basic needs.
Health and social protection systems, built around formal employment histories, are equally ill-suited to her reality. They were never designed to recognize unpaid caregiving as economic contribution, leaving Maria to navigate aging with limited institutional support despite having carried a substantial share of society’s care burden.
From an economic standpoint, this outcome is not accidental. The cost of care was systematically externalized. The state benefited while Maria was active through reduced public spending, stabilized labor markets, and sustained productivity then withdrew recognition when that labor could no longer be extracted. What remains is not simply a gender gap, but a structural distortion in how value, work, and retirement security are defined.
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The $3.2 Million Question: How Do We Settle It?
This is not a sentimental appeal. It is a question of policy design, fiscal logic, and institutional accountability.
Across the coming decades, hundreds of millions of women will reach retirement age having spent substantial portions of their working lives in unpaid caregiving roles, with little or no access to formal social protection. The economic contribution has already been made. The value has already been extracted. What remains unresolved is how societies account for that contribution once caregiving years are over.
From a policy perspective, the issue is straightforward: systems that rely on unpaid care without recognizing it create predictable outcomes lower lifetime earnings, reduced pension entitlements, and higher exposure to poverty in old age. These are not unintended consequences; they are the logical result of frameworks that treat caregiving as economically irrelevant while quietly depending on it. There are, however, clear and well-established policy mechanisms capable of addressing this imbalance.
One approach is the use of pension credits for caregiving years, whereby time spent in full-time care is formally counted as contributory service within public pension systems. This directly aligns retirement benefits with actual lifetime contributions, rather than uninterrupted labor market participation alone.
Another option involves direct caregiver stipends, providing financial support during active caregiving years to reduce long-term labor force exclusion and mitigate future pension gaps. Such programs recognize caregiving as work performed in the present, not merely as a social cost deferred to the future.
Tax reforms offer an additional lever. By granting meaningful credits or deductions tied to caregiving responsibilities, governments can acknowledge the economic value of care while improving lifetime financial resilience for caregivers. Finally, care-inclusive social insurance models can extend healthcare coverage, disability protection, and retirement benefits based on caregiving contributions, rather than limiting eligibility to formal employment histories alone.
These measures are not radical. They already exist in partial or pilot form across various countries. What is missing is not policy imagination, but policy prioritization.
Maria may have valued her role deeply. But affection does not substitute for income security, nor does dedication finance healthcare or housing in old age. A system that absorbs decades of unpaid labor and returns economic vulnerability is not merely inefficient it signals a structural failure to account for the very work that sustains it.
The question is no longer whether the debt exists. The question is whether policymakers are prepared to formally acknowledge it and design systems that settle it. Even with viable policy tools on the table, the deeper issue remains unresolved: unpaid care work is still treated not as a liability to be settled, but as a cost that can be indefinitely deferred.
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The Unsettled Account: A National Liability
For decades, unpaid care work has been treated as an infinite and costless input essential to the functioning of labor markets, yet absent from fiscal planning and pension design. Economists have acknowledged it in theory, but rarely in models. Governments have benefited from the reduced need for public care provision, while avoiding the long-term social insurance obligations that such work would normally generate. Employers, in turn, have relied on a labor force made possible by care performed elsewhere, off the books. That arrangement is no longer sustainable.
When viewed as an asset on society’s balance sheet, unpaid care work represents accumulated value that has already been realized through higher labor participation, lower public expenditure, and sustained economic output. With hundreds of millions of women excluded from paid employment due to caregiving, and unpaid work accounting for a share of economic value comparable to major industries, the cost of continued non-recognition is no longer marginal. It is systemic.
The imbalance becomes clearest at retirement. Maria’s lifetime contribution, valued conservatively at over $3.2 million, does not translate into security or protection. Instead, it results in reduced pension income, greater exposure to poverty, and limited access to healthcare and housing stability. This is not a failure of individual planning; it is the predictable outcome of policy frameworks that recognize extraction but not contribution.
At this point, the questions are unavoidable:
"Can someone who sustained households and enabled economic participation afford basic necessities in old age? Does longevity come with dignity, or with prolonged financial insecurity?
And can an economy that depends on unpaid labor yet returns vulnerability credibly claim success?"
Maria’s outcome is not an exception. It is a signal. And collectively, these outcomes amount to more than individual hardship they form a national accounting problem, one that reflects how societies define value, responsibility, and economic justice. Ignoring the account does not erase it. It simply compounds the liability. When a system repeatedly demonstrates that lifelong caregiving leads to economic insecurity rather than protection, it does more than disadvantage today’s retirees it sends a clear signal to the next generation making decisions about work, care, and family formation.
A Troubling Thought
And then a more unsettling question emerges. What if the global decline in fertility is not primarily a cultural shift, a lifestyle preference, or a generational attitude problem but a rational economic response?
Across countries, women are making a quiet calculation. They are observing what happened to Maria. They see decades of unpaid caregiving rewarded not with security, but with pension penalties, career erosion, and old-age vulnerability. In economic terms, motherhood and caregiving represent a negative return on investment in systems that fail to recognize care as work.
From this perspective, declining fertility is not a crisis of values it is a signal of policy failure. When societies structure care as a private obligation rather than a shared economic function, fewer people are willing to assume the risk. Fertility declines not because women reject family, but because the cost of caregiving has become too high, too uncertain, and too unsupported.
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If raising the next generation requires absorbing lifelong financial penalties, then opting out is not rebellion it is rational self-preservation.
The real question may not be why women are having fewer children, but why systems continue to demand unpaid care while refusing to insure the people who provide it.
Author’s Reflection
Writing The Maria Pension Plan required stepping back from abstract indicators and asking a more uncomfortable question: What happens when an economy runs successfully precisely because it excludes the labor that sustains it?
From a business and economic standpoint, unpaid caregiving is a textbook case of systemic value extraction. It lowers public expenditure, stabilizes labor markets, and subsidizes productivity yet it remains unpriced, uninsured, and largely unacknowledged in fiscal design. This is not an oversight; it is a structural choice embedded in how we define “work,” “contribution,” and “economic worth.”
What becomes clear through the data is that Maria’s outcome is not the result of personal sacrifice alone, but of policy architecture. Pension formulas reward uninterrupted formal employment. Social protection systems assume market participation as the primary pathway to security. Care, when recognized at all, is treated as a temporary deviation rather than a long-term economic function.
As governments prepare for rapidly aging populations, shrinking labor forces, and rising care needs, unpaid caregiving can no longer remain outside the policy frame. Ignoring it does not eliminate the cost it merely defers it, often into old-age poverty, health system strain, and intergenerational inequality.
The unresolved question, then, is not whether unpaid care work has value the evidence is overwhelming but whether current policy responses are commensurate with that value.
As of today, what concrete, enforceable pension or social protection reforms have policymakers implemented that genuinely recognize unpaid caregiving as economic work, rather than continuing to treat it as a private obligation with public consequences?
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References
- International Labour Organization. (2024). The impact of care responsibilities on women’s labour force participation (Statistical Brief).
- OECD. (2025). OECD Employment Outlook 2025: Setting the Scene.
- World Economic Forum. (2024). The Future of the Care Economy / Global Gender Gap Report 2025.
- UN Women & ILO. (2024). Estimates on unpaid care work and gender disparities.
