By — Kadambari Chand
Abstract:
Emotional and carework have historically been associated with femininity and maternal instincts, therefore, it has always been expected and seen as natural for women to do such work. This article explores how women are socialised into performing this care work in both the household and professional spaces. Although this labour plays a huge role in the smooth functioning of the capitalist economies, it still remains largely unaccounted and unpaid. Furthermore, this article also explores how gender socialization institutionalizes the idea of unpaid care work and normalises it, how emotional labor is made invisible within capitalism, and how these socialized roles still influence women in both their private as well as public spheres.
Introduction
For centuries, women have been performing care work, emotional labour as well as household labour for free without any wages. These tasks have always been framed as feminine work, attributed to a part of women’s nature. Since childhood, girls are socialised into performing domestic tasks and caretaking as their duty, installing the belief within them that they are responsible for fulfilling others’ needs. This conditions women to take responsibility for management and carework to the extent that it appears to be a part of their personality. Therefore, various kinds of care labour are connected with the very aspects of femininity, female nature,and at the end falls on the shoulders of women.
These expectations, with the coming of women into the workforce, have expanded from households and into workplaces. Women are expected to perform emotional work like resolving conflicts, hospitality, maintaining social harmony, and providing emotional support to their coworkers. Despite the time and effort involved in this work, it is largely unrecognized and unpaid, due to gendered socialization. Gendered socialization leads to the disproportionate distribution of emotional and care work on women and argues that such labour plays a crucial role in sustaining both households and institutional environments while remaining largely unrecognized in conventional economic frameworks, despite playing a huge part in their smooth functioning.
Socialisation into performing care work
Domestic and care work are generally associated with women and the idea of natural and maternal instinct, which constructs hegemonic femininity. However, this idea of what a ‘good woman’ is supposed to be is not true, and these roles are socially constructed. Women, ever since they were young girls, are socialised into performing tasks such as caregiving, household, and emotional maintenance. Gender socialisation is the process by which an individual learns the appropriate cultural behaviour of femininity or masculinity that is associated with the biological sex of male and female. Moreover, it naturalises gender roles and obscures the fact that they are not innate to the nature of men and women and are rather socially constructed. Empirical studies show that girls globally spend 50 percent more time doing house chores than boys of the same age, and an average adult woman spends almost 2 to 3 times more time doing the housework as an average man.
Furthermore, this type of socialisation ends up normalising gender roles as common sense or as naturally occurring and frame them as feminine characteristics and hides the process of socialisation in the patriarchal society that normalises these characters, and overshadows these tasks being measurable labour. This results in the internalisation of these gender roles by both men and women, leading to women feeling responsible for doing all the care work and emotional work. Consequently, women often internalise these expectations and may experience guilt or failure when unable to fulfil them,often leading to feelings of perfectionism, inadequacy and guilt if they fail to meet them. This results in the persistence of unpaid and unrecognised labour across both professional and domestic spaces.
Unrecognised Labour in Domestic and Professional Spaces
Gender socialisation, along with social and institutional structures, preserves and enforces the gendered division of labour. This division appears in its most visible form in the households where women are entrusted with the task of performing all the household chores, taking care of all, from the elderly to the children, as well as maintaining equanimity and providing emotional support to everyone in the house. Furthermore, this work is not recognised by the family and is not accounted as a work in formal labour markets and national economic accounting systems which are often used by organisations like WHO, IMF, and International Labour Organisation, despite contributing a lot in economic and social reproduction.This workload became even more visible during COVID-19, when the boundaries between work and home became blurred, shifting the entire load of housework, along with the office work, onto the shoulders of women.
This workload is often thought to be fulfilling for women and is surrounded by the rhetoric that women should love taking care of their family and feel fulfilled in performing these tasks as it is part of their maternal instinct. While biological and hormonal factors play a role in facilitating caregiving behaviours, research shows that maternal instinct is not completely innate to women; instead a larger part of it is developed through long term socialisation and experiences. This rhetoric works on the internal conscience of women, making them feel guilty and view themselves as bad mothers and wives when they are not able to do this work and feel unsatisfied. This further makes it harder to demand for a pay or assistance in the housework.
Unrecognised work is not limited to domestic spheres, but extends to professional spaces, in spite of being commonly associated with the domestic spaces. Gendered division of labour actively shapes the allocation of additional responsibilities in workspaces. These tasks are often not visible in professional spaces, often overshadowed by professional work or the official position of women in the workspace. These range from doing small tasks like making coffee for everyone to more important ones like resolving conflicts, training and helping the newcomers, and planning office events. More often than not these tasks are not expected of men, revealing how these expectations and norms naturalise women’s role as caregivers even in professional settings. Although they consume an important part of the worktime and are extremely important for smooth functioning, and maintaining productivity in the professional setups, they remain unrecognised and unpaid for, not considered as work responsibilities. These tasks are termed as office housework by Rosabeth Moss Kanter who first identified this in 1977.he noticed how it is often expected of women to fill unofficial roles like ‘office wife’ or ‘team mother’. Various feminist sociologists and political economists have studied how women always end up performing these non- promotional tasks, which although takes a considerable amount of their time but is not accounted for at the time of promotions.
This unequal allocation of extra responsibilities in their workspaces is due to the organisations being gendered. According to Joan Ackeer, the workspaces and rules are often structured around the model of an ideal male worker, where an ideal worker should only bother about paid work and give maximal output, and should not be bothered with housework and caregiving responsibilities. Women are often considered to be less committed and suitable and hence, the social expectations of performing these types of work fall on women. Therefore, the organisation structure which is gender biased imports the domestic workload as well as additional mental load in the worksphere, leading women employees to perform unpaid emotional work as a hidden work demand.
Capitalism and Invisible Labour
The unpaid and unrecognised work of women under capitalist systems have been studied by various feminist scholars. According to Silvia Federici, the emergence of capitalism is closely tied with the transformation of life and relations. One of its important aspects was disciplining of women and the body. She argues that relating work to acts of love for women is a necessary construct essential for making labour unwaged. Furthermore, this unwaged work is essential for the capitalist system to function. If the unpaid housework was accounted for it would account for a large part in the GDP. According to a study conducted by Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC 2022) for APEC member economies, the value of unpaid care and domestic work accounts to an aggregate of 9% of the global GDP, which is equivalent to $11 trillion. In India, the findings reveal that the estimated value of unpaid housework in India ranged from 26% to 36% of gross domestic product in 2022-23. However, the value of this work remains unaccounted for, uncompensated and therefore unpaid. In this way, capitalist economies externalise the costs of social reproduction, relying on the unpaid work of women to maintain households and reproduce the workforce without bearing the economic costs.
Similarly, this concept of invisible extraction can be seen in the case of office housework. Just as housework is seen as natural to women, the work of maintaining team morale and resolving conflicts is seen as a feminine nature in the workplace rather than official work of value. Just as housework produces the hidden value for the capitalist system, it produces a hidden value in the workspaces. This ‘office housework’ that women perform acts as a ‘social lubricant for the working machinery of the organisations’ and since these tasks are non-promotional and not accounted for women, furthermore, ends up losing out on promotional opportunities.
Conclusion
The association of emotional work, care, and domestic work of women is not natural. Instead, it is sociologically constructed. From childhood, women are taught how to maintain relationships, do household chores and be empathetic and emotionally available. Over time, these came to be associated with femininity; therefore, women continue to carry the disproportionate burden of the carework. This can be seen both in the domestic and professional spaces, and this also leads to women taking the double burden of work, which leads to mental and physical exhaustion. Although these tasks are essential for the smooth functioning of families and organizations, they remain largely unrecognized and unrewarded. Feminist scholars have shown that this invisibility allows capitalist systems to benefit from women’s labour without formally valuing or compensating it.
About the Author
Kadambari Chand is a first-year student pursuing a B.A. (Hons.) in Political Science at O.P. Jindal Global University. Her interests lie in understanding how class, caste, religion, and other intersecting structures of power shape political and social life.