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Who Cares? Reflections on Claudia Goldin’s Nobel Prize and Women’s Work in Bangladesh

U-Shaped Curves and Why-Shaped Trends

Dr Claudia Goldin’s extensive work on women’s labour force participation over the last century was recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics[1]. Her account of structural transformations, shifting social norms, technological developments, and increasing educational attainment on women’s employment offers crucial insights into the dynamics shaping female labour force participation around the world. The state of women’s working lives in Bangladesh demonstrates interesting similarities, but also important contrasts, from the narrative Dr Goldin explores.

Dr Goldin’s famous U-shaped curve of female labour force participation highlights how the changing economic landscape of a society coalesces with gendered social norms to shape women’s employment[2]. In this U-shaped curve, a shift from agricultural to industrial employment reduces female labour force participation. As the demand for women’s labour in (often home-based[3] and flexible) agrarian activities diminishes, women’s employment declines.

When new opportunities in factory employment emerge, Dr Goldin argues, women are prevented from accessing them by gendered stigmas relating to manual work in the public sphere and by perceived threats to the capability of the male breadwinner. Furthermore, factory manufacturing roles lack the flexibility of home-based agricultural work, making it challenging for women to attend to their designated unpaid domestic and care responsibilities. However, as educational attainment rises and opportunities expand in more “appropriate” workplaces of the service sector, women’s employment again rises.

Technological innovations and changing tides of social norms simultaneously enable women to exert greater control over their reproductive and productive lives.

Bangladesh experienced a similar decline in women’s economic activities, as structural transformation shifted a traditionally subsistence-oriented agrarian society into rapidly urbanizing and expanding industrial and service sectors. Consistent with the U-shaped curve, female labour force participation has again increased. However, the factors underpinning this trend in Bangladesh diverge from the logic of Dr Goldin’s upturn. From the 1980s, Bangladesh’s industry burgeoned as the country positioned itself as a hub for ready-made garment (RMG) manufacture. The industry relied on a pool of predominantly female labour. Women engaging in factory employment renegotiated gendered norms around work and mobility in gradual and conflictual ways. Factory employment offered women income, and with growing economic independence came new freedoms. However, confronting the pervasive stigma attached to working outside the home, RMG employment also fostered new forms of risk, as factory workers often navigated household tensions and harassment.[4]

Instead of industry growth correlating with a total decline in female employment, and contrary to the original U-shaped curve logic, the RMG industry precipitated Bangladesh’s increasing female labour force participation over the last four decades—in employment outside the home that challenged gender norms head on.

The story of women’s increasing employment in Bangladesh is dominated by the rise of employment outside the home in the RMG industry, but another important trend is also evident. While female employment has increased, none of this increase in more recent years has been from growth in employment outside the home. Instead, women’s work has increasingly shifted back toward home-based employment. Between 2003 and 2015, while the number of women working outside the home remained constant at six million, the number of those working from home increased from three million to nine million.[5]

Home-based work has implications for the degree of economic empowerment women experience in relation to their employment, tending to be lower-skilled and lower-paid. Bangladesh has witnessed impressive gains in female educational attainment and fertility rate reductions—factors that, according to Dr Goldin’s experience, should facilitate women’s access to better quality jobs outside the home. Yet, as a proportion of total working women, those working outside the home have decreased dramatically.

There are a multitude of potential reasons suggested for this increase in home-based work. One argument is that increasing wealth allows for a resurgence of norms preferring female seclusion, in line with Dr Goldin’s U-shaped logic during industrialization. Another factor suggested to underpin increasing preferences for home-based work is the flexibility associated with balancing unpaid care work responsibilities—a dynamic that Dr Goldin’s work also shows to be central to women’s working lives.

The Tug of Care

Dr Goldin’s work highlights how women’s employment trajectories are shaped by the tug of war between demands at work and responsibilities at home. Gendered social norms designate unpaid care and domestic work to be the domain of women. This gendered distribution of responsibilities entails substantial workloads that go unaccounted for in most economic assessments but nonetheless contribute essential and valuable labour that enables households, communities, and societies to function.

Recent initiatives to capture the full picture of work—in all its unpaid and paid forms—offer insights into the extent to which women’s working lives are shaped by unpaid care. Bangladesh’s first national time-use survey, carried out in 2021, unveils these uneven, unpaid workloads: women spend an average of 4.6 hours on unpaid domestic work and 1.2 hours on unpaid caregiving daily, while men dedicate 0.6 and 0.2 hours to these activities, respectively, each day.[6]

With 5.8 hours dedicated to domestic and care work each day, women in Bangladesh are already committed to a 40-hour unpaid week on top of any paid employment. Domestic tasks like laundry, cooking, and cleaning can be adjusted around rigid work commitments. Care work, however, especially for women with young children, is inherently inflexible and deeply personal. Even routine care tasks, such as feeding and bathing, require caregivers to be “on call,” nearby, and ready to respond to a grazed knee or a hungry cry. Norms of childcare provision beyond household networks are nascent in Bangladesh, with few accessible and affordable options for working parents.

With these large unpaid workloads made visible, the issue of the inaccessibility of work opportunities for women becomes clearer. Dr Goldin’s depiction of the tug of war between career and family takes a specific form in Bangladesh, but this tug of care is one factor that fundamentally shapes the extent to which women can access employment opportunities and achieve economic empowerment through them. Across continents and decades, the implication remains the same: who cares matters.

How can paid work opportunities be made more accessible for women navigating the tug of war between work and family?

Care That Works

Offering a potential solution to this tug of war between employment and care responsibilities, BRAC is pioneering a model of home-based childcare to serve families in low-income areas. BRAC’s Care Model recruits childcare entrepreneurs, often individuals already providing informal childcare within their close community, and offers them the training and support to operate home-based childcare centres. Entrepreneurs undergo training to enhance their understanding of child safety, development, and play-based learning. They also receive toys, decorations, and necessary resources.

I recently had the opportunity to visit several BRAC home-based childcare centres. We arrived in a residential area of Savar, just outside the Export Processing Zone, a hub of RMG factories. It was lunchtime, and the streets were bustling with garment workers on their break. We navigated around brightly adorned laundry lines strung across winding lanes, peeking into compounds of one-room and two-room houses. In one of these compounds, in one of these houses, we were welcomed into the home and workplace of a khala[7]. The bed was spread with bright pink toys, and three young children sprawled playing with them. The khala bounced one of the children on her lap as she spoke with us, telling us how she loved working with the children and how the income from the childcare centre supported her own family through a time of financial instability.

Alongside the caregivers, we spent time listening to working mothers who rely on these home-based childcare services. These individuals represent two sides of the rising curve of women’s employment in Bangladesh: women who have negotiated traditional norms of female employment and mobility to take advantage of opportunities for paid employment in the RMG industry, and women who are joining the growing service sector and engaging in home-based work.

As easy as it is to reduce these women to data points on a curious trend curve, listening to their experiences was a crucial reminder of how personal and complex decisions around care and work are. The mothers we spoke to often voiced their desire to work in garment factories to provide a better future for their children. Many mentioned that, without the caregiver’s services, they would not be able to do this work. Childcare decisions were made delicately, with the child’s safety and well-being at the centre. Finding a child carer who was deeply trusted, affordable, and accessible was a central component to women fulfilling both their childcare and employment aspirations.

Dr Goldin’s Nobel prize-winning work highlights the existence of numerous barriers that restrict the economic opportunities that women are afforded. In Bangladesh, the challenges are contextually specific, multiple, and intersecting. However, in a context where unpaid care work remains firmly in the female domain, ensuring that mothers have access to trustworthy and affordable childcare options is one essential step up the U-shaped curve.

Photo: Manjunath Kiran/AFP

References

[1] For an overview of Dr Claudia Goldin’s work and her Nobel Prize award, see https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2023/press-release/

[2] “Employment” refers to any work done to produce goods or provide services for pay or profit. This includes work done for wages, as well as self-employment, and unpaid contributions to a family enterprise.

[3] As the name suggests, “home-based” employment refers to that which is carried out within the home. This concept refers to the location of work and encompasses employment across different occupations and sectors. For example, unpaid work for a family enterprise processing crops at home ready for the market is considered home-based employment. Offering online tutoring from home for hourly wages is also considered home-based employment.

[4] These tensions faced by female RMG workers are explored in depth in Naila Kabeer’s 2000 book The Power to Choose.

[5] Based on the analysis by Tonmoy Islam and Kotikula, 2023. https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/872026/adr-vol40no1-4-home-based-work-bangladeshi-women.pdf

[6] Analysis by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) and UN Women, using data from the Bangladesh Time Use Survey 2021, https://data.unwomen.org/publications/bangladesh-time-use-survey-2021

[7] Khala is the Bengali term for maternal auntie, used to refer to caregivers.


Kate Brockie is a PhD student at University of Cambridge

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