Islamabad, Dec 29 (IANS) A research emerging from Pakistan has revealed that the intersectional nature of women’s role in care work is difficult to ignore. The burden of care and low-paid labour in Pakistan falls heaviest on women positioned at the margins of social power, a report has stated.
Pakistan is projected to become the world’s third most populous nation in 25 years, a figure highlighted at the Dawn Population Summit held earlier in December. As the population will increase, care needs across Pakistan will also rise, including direct personal care and indirect care activities in domestic, hospital, and community settings, research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Meherunissa Hamid, wrote in a report in Pakistan’s leading daily Dawn. Despite being necessary, care work continues to be considered as a responsibility that naturally belongs to women, rather than as skilled labour that needs dignity, protection, or policy attention.
“Recently, to mark the International Day of Care and Support, the International Labour Organisation called for ‘stronger recognition of care work and coordinated action to ensure decent work, social protection, and equality for all care workers’ in Pakistan. However, a darker truth must be addressed. Not only is there a disproportionate burden of formal and informal care work on women, but it is also borne unequally among women, making care work a deeply intersectional issue,” the Dawn report stated.
“Looking closely at the research emerging from Pakistan, the intersectional nature of women’s role in care work is difficult to ignore. The burden of care and low-paid labour falls heaviest on women positioned at the margins of social power. Research from Sargodha shows how women domestic workers stand at the intersections of gender, class, and minority identity. Poor, often migrant and sometimes religious minority women keep urban households running, yet remain invisible because home-based work, shaped by social and class hierarchies, makes exploitation easy to hide,” it added.
Covid-19 research in Abbottabad showcases how these inequalities exist. Women conducted several times more unpaid care work than men, reinforcing a gender order where men’s paid work relies on women’s unrecognised labour. Research on nursing identity in hospitals reveal how gender, class, and professional hierarchy together devalue nurses, who are treated as servants stigmatised for night shifts and physical proximity to male patients and disrespected by doctors and patients. Lady health workers continue to face insecurity, harassment, and chronic struggles for recognition and regularisation.
“These layers of inequality do not compete; they compound. The women in the Pakistani care workforce, for instance, are not ‘just’ women, or ‘just’ poor, or ‘just’ Muslim, Christian or Hindu, or ‘just’ from the village; all these identities together shape where they can work, how they are spoken to, whether they are safe, and whether the law protects them. Being a woman, economically deprived, from a ‘low’ or stigmatised group, and working in the formal or informal care system is not four separate problems. It is one deeply entangled condition of vulne- rability,” the report detailed.
“Intersectionality simply asks us to be honest about our own hierarchies. Who changes the sheets in private homes and hospital wards? Who cleans our toilets? Who cleans our streets? Who walks from house to house with the vaccine carrier? Who cares for our parents as they grow older? Who cooks, washes, and cares without it ever being paid or even acknowledged? Pakistan cannot build a fairer future without recognising how paid and unpaid care work is organised through layers of inequalities,” it added.
–IANS
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