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.