INTHEBLACK February / March 2026 - Magazine - Page 20
F E AT U R E
“You cannot leave the house in the morning without eating,
washing or getting dressed. All of those things rely on the
foundational care economy to provide you with the basics
that enable you to do anything else.”
EMMA DAWSON, CHIFLEY RESEARCH CENTRE
the importance of valuing care. We can no
longer afford to keep care as something that
just happens in the background.”
Promisingly, Blackberry says that more
governments are starting to treat the care
community as “critical infrastructure in
the same way as transport, energy and
health systems”.
Annabelle Daniel OAM is CEO of
Women’s Community Shelters, an Australian
for-purpose organisation that provides
accommodation and support for women and
children escaping violence and experiencing
homelessness. She believes the care economy
has been “staggeringly underestimated”
in terms of how many lives it touches.
“At some point, most of us will have
somebody in our network who will need
aged-care services, for example, or access to
disability support workers,” Daniel says.
She is encouraged by rising government,
business and philanthropic support for her
group’s shelters, along with more corporate
and community leaders who are serving on
the boards of local shelters as a way of giving
back to their cities and towns.
“There is an understanding that domestic
violence is a whole-of-society problem and it
needs a whole-of-society solution. People are
getting involved as part of a more
caring Australia.”
AN ‘INVISIBLE SERVICE’
The Australian Government is confident the
care economy can contribute to gender and
socio-economic equality, poverty reduction,
inclusive growth and sustainable development.
Public policy architect and executive
director of the Chifley Research Centre
Emma Dawson believes discussions about
sharing economic wealth and investing in
the care economy go to the heart of what
a country wants to be. She says that GDP
explicitly excludes unpaid domestic labour
20 INTHEBLACK February/March 2026
as an input to the economy. While goods
and services are treated as valuable outputs,
domestic care has been an “invisible service”
undertaken in the home.
“But it is critical,” she says. “You cannot
leave the house in the morning without
eating, washing or getting dressed. All of
those things rely on the foundational care
economy to provide you with the basics that
enable you to do anything else.”
Dawson says economists are still struggling
with how to apply market-based metrics
such as productivity growth to the care
economy. However, she is encouraged that
the Productivity Commission in Australia
has expanded its focus to consider the care
economy, social mobility and inequality
through a gender lens. “That is a very
good development,” she says.
“But more broadly, as a culture, we need
to understand the importance of the care
and education of young children, people
with disabilities and elderly loved ones as
a whole-of-economy concern. It is not just
about the burden of women in the home.”
GENDER-RESPONSIVE MODELS
The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender
Gap Report 2025 notes that women make
up 41.2 per cent of the global workforce, but
they are mostly employed in lower-paying
sectors such as care and education. The report
predicts that gender parity could be as much
as 123 years away.
Deepa Bharathi, senior gender equality
specialist at the International Labour
Organisation (ILO) in Thailand, says
gender stereotypes and entrenched social
norms systematically confine care work as
a “woman’s responsibility”. These stereotypes
result in undervaluation of the critical
importance and contribution of care work
to families, communities and economies.
Globally, women disproportionately bear
