When Covid-19 hit in 2020, it forced a long-overdue reckoning with the role of care in keeping our societies running. Suddenly, the crisis exposed what had too long remained neglected: the essential role played by nurses, carers, cleaners, childcare workers, home helpers and countless others on the frontlines.
But it also made visible the vast amount of unpaid care work, that ‘daily labour that keeps households, families, and communities running’, historically (and still) carried overwhelmingly by women, who spend ‘more than 2.5 times as many hours a day on unpaid care work than men’.
For a few months, the ‘care economy’ – childcare, eldercare, disability support, domestic work, and all those activities, both paid and unpaid, that enable societies to function – was finally recognised as essential infrastructure, no less vital than transport, energy or digital systems. And in a sector where women represent around 65 % of the workforce, that recognition really mattered.
Six years later, with that sense of urgency fading, the structural inequalities the pandemic exposed remain firmly in place: ‘women continue to carry the main burden of unpaid care across the EU, particularly in terms of intensity’, limiting their time for paid work and career advancement. And worldwide, ‘unpaid care work prevents 708 million women from participating in the labour market’.
As the 2026 EU Diversity Month calls for an ‘inclusive labour market for all’, where ‘everyone of working age, in particular vulnerable and disadvantaged people, can participate in quality, paid work’, women’s unpaid care work should no longer remain invisible. An inclusive labour market depends on unpaid care work.
And that’s why it must once again be placed at the centre of public debate and policymaking: not only as an economic necessity, but as a matter of gender equality and – ultimately – as a fundamental human right.
Social reproduction and the labour market
Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have highlighted how our economies rely on an unequal division of labour, particularly within the household. They described this often invisible reality as ‘reproductive labour’ or ‘social reproduction’, the essential work that sustains families and communities, makes productive labour possible, and ultimately reproduces the workforce of the future.
At the institutional level, organisations like the UN have helped bring greater visibility to this issue, developing more consistent policy frameworks, innovative proposals and political declarations, like the Tlatelolco Commitment, around care, gender equality and labour market participation.
Beyond this, care work remains confined to the private sphere. And here’s the problem. Until it’s brought into the public sphere and recognised for its potential contribution to economic growth and collective wellbeing, it will continue to be systematically undervalued and largely excluded from official economic measurements and traditional definitions of ‘the economy’.
Addressing this goes far beyond simply remunerating household and care work. It means recognising care as a pillar of the economy and redistributing responsibility for it, for example, through stronger and equal parental leave schemes, better childcare and eldercare services and a reduction of the informal and precarious conditions that continue to define care work.
And for as long as this happens, inclusive labour markets and gender equality simply won’t be achieved.
The Latin American case: the ‘right to care’
One possible way forward would be a broader normative shift: moving care from a private to a public issue, where it’s recognised and supported as a collective responsibility and as a human right.
Latin America has taken an important step in this direction, more explicitly recognising the ‘right to care’. In August 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), through its Advisory Opinion No. 31, formally recognised the ‘right to care’ as a human right. The Opinion followed a request submitted in March 2023 by Argentina’s Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity, together with other public institutions. Importantly, the right to care is defined across three interconnected dimensions: the right to receive care, the right to provide care and the right to self-care.
This represents a significant shift in how care is understood across society. On the one hand, establishing care as a right also means recognising the people who provide it and ensuring they have decent working conditions.
On the other hand, this approach reflects precisely that idea of a ‘care society’ where care is understood as ‘a shared responsibility involving the state, markets, communities and families’, rather than a private burden placed mainly on women.
From recognition to implementation
The Latin American approach is an important reference point for the EU. The EU has increasingly recognised the importance of care, through initiatives such as the European Care Strategy, the Work-life Balance Directive, and the European Pillar of Social Rights.
Which means the problem isn’t the absence of a common framework but that this framework is made up of mainly strategies, recommendations and specific directives, which don’t foster the consistent implementation of care policies across Member States. As seen in the last CARE Survey 2024, there are still significant gaps in access to affordable childcare, long-term care and support for unpaid carers.
Women continue to bear the cost of the ‘care penalty’, defined as ‘the amount of potential earnings foregone by women because of the unbalanced distribution of unpaid care work within households’, which was estimated as accounting for ‘at least EUR 242 billion a year in the EU’.
Recognising care more explicitly as a right at the EU level could help give greater coherence and ambition to existing care policies. And this matters because the unequal distribution of care remains one of the main structural barriers preventing gender equality in the labour market.
Investing in care isn’t only a matter of social protection: it’s both a gender equality imperative and an economic strategy. Stronger care systems create quality jobs, support more equal participation in the labour market and enable a fairer distribution of paid and unpaid work.
As Europe’s population ages and care needs increase, failing to invest in care means reproducing inequalities that continue to limit women’s economic autonomy and full participation in public life.
A truly inclusive labour market cannot be built on their invisible labour.
This commentary is part of a short series of commentaries to mark European Diversity Month, which will be published over the course of May.
