Supported by women for generations: unpaid care workImage: watson/keystone
Feminist strike
Women do over three quarters of unpaid care work worldwide. They look after elderly family members, clean houses, cook and look after the children. This unpaid care work is essential for our economic system. A look at the numbers behind care work.
June 14, 2026, 2:14 p.mJune 14, 2026, 2:14 p.m
The number of hours worked in housework, cleaning, caring for elderly family members or looking after children often remains invisible. It is considered a private matter. But care work is responsible for the vast majority of the work done worldwide.
Over three quarters of the global hours worked in care work are carried out by women – unpaid. This imbalance ultimately leads to injustice: women work more for less money.
Not only are women not paid for a large part of their work, they are also often unable to participate in the regular labor market due to the care work they do – even if they would want to. Around 748 million people worldwide who care for relatives, clean their homes, look after children, cook for their partner or do other reproductive work cannot do paid work. 94 percent of them are women.
Care work
This article deals exclusively with unpaid care work.
But even if more women are able to take up paid work, this does not automatically mean a change in the situation. Women work more. When both paid work and unpaid care work are taken into account, a woman’s average working day is longer than a man’s. On average, a woman works 7 hours and 28 minutes a day, while a man works 6 hours and 44 minutes.
This development is evident in middle-income countries. Although the liberalization of the labor market means that women have more opportunities to pursue paid work, at the same time the demographics and the role of the family are also changing.
Life expectancy in middle-income countries is 73 years old, around seven years higher than in low-wage countries and this aging population requires more nursing and care work. At the same time, families in middle- and high-income countries are shrinking, making the share of care traditionally provided by an extended family less important.
There is hardly any help with care work – not even paid help. In low- and middle-income countries, institutionalized care infrastructure, such as daycare centers and nursing homes, is hardly available or is too expensive.
What is available, however, are jobs in the private sector. Men do significantly more paid work in middle-income countries. In return, they spend less time on housework, caring for the elderly or looking after children. The amount of time women spend on unpaid care work increases overall in order to compensate for the drastic decline in men’s unpaid working hours.
Switzerland
Similar developments can also be observed in Switzerland. Overall, working hours for women and men have been increasing consistently for years. While the average working day in other high-income countries is around 6 hours and 30 minutes, men in Switzerland work 7 hours and 45 minutes, women even 8 hours and 10 minutes. The trend is increasing.
However, men in Switzerland are increasingly taking on more unpaid care work. But the imbalance between paid work and unpaid work for women and men remains high – women continue to do around 61 percent of their working hours in unpaid care work, while men only do 42 percent. But while unpaid care work is increasing overall in Switzerland, it is also shifting – especially to migrant women.
They now do almost twice as many hours of unpaid care work as in 2013. In general, migrants do more unpaid care work than Swiss people. According to the Federal Statistical Office, women from non-EU third countries work around 42.3 hours unpaid per week; over ten hours more than Swiss women and more than twice as much as men with a Swiss passport.
Unaffordable care work?
This discrepancy between paid and unpaid hours of work makes women, on average, financially poorer than men. Despite the dependence of our economic system on precisely this reproductive work, it counts as a private and family matter.
The federal government expected hypothetical spending on unpaid care work of around 401 billion francs in 2020. That’s just over 9.2 billion unpaid working hours.
Worldwide, 16.4 billion hours of unpaid care work are performed every day. If these hours of work were compensated with a local, legal minimum wage, the expenditure of around 11 trillion US dollars would amount to nine percent of the global gross domestic product International Labor Organization Report calculated.
Assuming that this wage is divided equally between the hours worked, women would be entitled to around $8.8 trillion in additional wages every day.