Unpaid Care Work and Adolescent Girls: Gendered Labour Systems and Early Economic Pathways

Abstract

Unpaid care labor is a traditional but underestimated element of economies, and feminine implications are disproportionately placed on adolescent girls. This paper discusses the types and extent of unpaid care labour performed by teenage girls, gender labour regimes that inform and determine these tasks and the implications on early economic trajectories. Based on a mixed methodology, the research will combine some quantitative data on time utilization and education and early economic involvement with qualitative data on social norms, household decision-making, and institutional organization. The results indicate that paid care work is a daily, intensive aspect of the life of adolescent girls, which creates a high level of time poverty limiting schooling, skills acquisition, and participation in the labour market. Care does not simply get distributed but is structurally entrenched in gendered systems of labour that exist in the household, community and the institution. The systems make the roles of caregiving normal in girls but do not give them enough public or institutional support, and thus recreates early economic disadvantage.
The paper also proves that the cumulative and intergenerational consequences of care work in adolescence create pathways of school-to-work and direct girls towards more precarious economic or care-oriented career paths. Viewed through the prism of feminist economics, social reproduction theory, and the human capital theory, the results present the simultaneous maintenance of economic systems and the collapse in the economic potential of girls in the long term. The paper is relevant to the care economy scholarship in the sense that it preempts the portrayal of adolescence as an important life course phase in the reproduction of gendered inequality. The policy implications include the importance of care sensitive education systems, intensifying of social protection and specific interventions, which acknowledge, mitigate, and redistribute unpaid care work. Unpaid care in girls of adolescent age is a problem that needs attention in order to achieve gender equality and inclusive economic growth.