Published on: July 23, 2025

Caregiving rarely announces itself as a life event. It seeps in, quietly and relentlessly, until one day you realize your life has reorganized itself around someone else’s needs. Every caregiving journey is different – shaped by the illness, the family it affects, the resources available, and other factors. I have no interest in comparing burdens. But after almost a  decade as a caregiver, I’ve come to believe this: caregiving is fundamentally different for women.

Not because we feel more. Not because we’re better at it. But because we’re expected to. The difference is structural. Social. Historical. It’s not just in what we do, it’s in what is assumed of us. When a parent falls ill, when a child struggles, when a family begins to fray, the question is rarely who will care, but which woman will. A daughter. A wife. A sister. A daughter-in-law.

We all manage appointments, decipher medical jargon, sit through long waits in hospitals, and make life-altering decisions for loved ones. But beyond this, women also help with showers, track dietary restrictions, cook meals, soothe moods, mediate family tension, and carry the emotional weight of the patient and everyone around them. We are not just caregivers. We are emotional anchors, crisis responders, nurses, cooks, companions, project managers, and decision-makers. We do not clock in, and we do not get to clock out.

There is also the quiet emotional calculus – how often we hesitate before expressing frustration, how deeply we internalise guilt, how careful we are not to appear resentful. The world is far more forgiving of women who suffer silently than of women who ask to be seen. When we do speak, we are often rebuked. We are told we are being too emotional. Or that this is simply what daughters do. There is no fanfare for doing what society has quietly always expected of you. On the other hand, men who provide care are often applauded – seen as emotionally intelligent and courageous for showing vulnerability. 

Care is often framed as a personal sacrifice. But caregiving isn’t just individual. It’s political. It is infrastructural. It underpins everything else. The ability to participate in society, whether in work, education, or politics, is directly shaped by the availability and distribution of care. For those of us who have been caregivers, this is not an abstraction. It is a set of constraints that follow us into every decision: how far from home we live, what relationships we invest in, what dreams feel plausible.

Globally, 708 million women are outside the workforce because of unpaid care responsibilities – seventeen times more than men (40 million). Among paid caregivers, such as nurses, domestic workers, eldercare aides, women make up the majority, often underpaid and overworked. But care, even among women, is not shared equally. Those already pushed to the margins — migrant women, working-class women, Dalit women, women of colour — carry the compounded weight of gender, class, caste, and race. The daughter who puts her dreams on hold, caught between obligation and opportunity. The migrant domestic worker crosses oceans, leaving her own children behind to tend to someone else’s. These are not isolated stories but the architecture of an invisible economy built on the backs of women, generation after generation. It is a system sustained by sacrifice and silence.

And all of this exists alongside work cultures that were never designed with women in mind. 

Women’s careers aren’t just constrained by care work, they’re defined by it. While men are often praised for “juggling both,” women are expected to do so without dropping a ball. I’ve made career decisions not based on ambition, but on proximity: how close I could stay to home in case of a medical emergency. That proximity, that availability, is assumed. It shapes how we work, what roles we accept, how much we’re paid, and how far we’re allowed to go. 

Even the most progressive workplaces rarely account for caregiving in how they design roles or measure success. Flexibility is dangled like a reward, not offered as a right. And when women take it, they’re sidelined – more likely to scale back, more likely to exit, more likely to retire with less.

But here’s the contradiction: the very skills caregiving demands are celebrated in leadership. We make complex decisions under pressure. We manage crises. We develop emotional resilience. We build systems — reminders, checklists, workflows — like miniature operations teams. The only things missing are shared calendars and Gantt charts. These aren’t soft skills. They’re survival skills. Strategic skills.
Yet care work is still framed as a detour from ambition rather than evidence of it.

A year ago, when my father needed emergency surgery, I messaged my team to say I’d be starting the day late. Every single colleague offered to cover for me. That kind of workplace culture, where care is met with support, is rare. More often, we are told to compartmentalize, to leave parts of ourselves at the door. But we do our best work when we’re allowed to be whole.

There’s a quote I come back to often: “It takes a village to raise a child.” I believe it takes a village to care – for children, for the sick, for the aging, for one another. But for too long, that village has been filled with women. Quietly holding it all together.

What would it look like to build a society that doesn’t reward women for their capacity to endure, but instead works to distribute care more fairly? Where workplaces don’t penalize caregiving but adapt to it? Where men don’t help, but participate?

The work of care is not just the act of tending to another, it is the emotional scaffolding of society. And if we continue to let women carry that weight alone, we are not just burning them out, we are hollowing out the possibility of a truly just world. We can no longer afford to treat care work as an individual burden or a moral obligation. It is a public good. A form of labor. A structural challenge. One that requires structural solutions.

Care may be love. But it is also labour. And it is time we treated it as both.

*Data from International Labour Organisation (ILO) Website

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