A woman’s place is in the home…? How design thinking can challenge entrenched social attitudes

February 22, 2019

This year's International Women's Day theme is "Think equal, build smart, and innovate for change", so we're asking: how can we break down bad behaviours for the better, faster?

How can we break down bad behaviours for the better, faster?

For instance, what will it take to tackle an age-old problem such as unpaid care and domestic work? How does one disrupt a trajectory where many women across the world increasingly find themselves expected to do two full-time jobs: one paid and one unpaid. 

Now innovative approaches like design thinking could potentially provide new solutions to stubborn problems.

Housework is still largely considered a woman’s job. While progress has been made to encourage women to obtain employment - through training programmes, investment in education and skills development, and policy changes – even when they have a career, women continue to have the added assumed responsibility of looking after children and relatives, doing the laundry, cleaning, cooking, and fetching water and food.

This unpaid care and domestic work remains the main barrier to women’s economic empowerment, preventing women from getting into, remaining in, and progressing in the labour force. Other implications include increased time stress and time poverty, missed opportunities for the uptake of skills, education and socialisation, and a negative impact on health. Importantly, the added drudgery of unpaid care and domestic work also leads to reinstating the gendered division of labour, further reinforcing inequalities and standing in the way of women’s empowerment. 

In Asia and the Pacific, men perform the lowest share of unpaid care work of all other regions at 1 hour and 4 minutes a day, sinking to 31 minutes in India and just 28 minutes in Pakistan.

            

Design thinking is a human-centred technique to solve problems in a creative and innovative way. It works around understanding the user or those individuals impacted, challenge assumptions, and redefining the problem of unpaid care and domestic work in such a way as to identify strategies and solutions that are not immediately apparent. Design thinking is fundamentally lateral problem-solving, and actively challenges preconceived ideas.

In Hyderabad, UNDP India’s Disha project (supported by the IKEA Foundation), UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub, WeHub, and Youth Co:Lab (a regional initiative co-led by UNDP and Citi Foundation) came together in an Open Ideation Workshop, discussing the challenges and opportunities around reducing and redistributing unpaid care and domestic work using this approach.

To change people’s behaviour towards and perception of unpaid work, participants considered a few different options. One solution proposed by the participants involved working together with major advertising companies and agencies, and offering them gender-responsive training. The advertising industry in the Asia region has grown exponentially. By encouraging images used in advertising to take a more gender-neutral approach, they could potentially influence the narrative of gender roles in the home and help redistribute unpaid work more fairly between women and men.

A key barrier to the greater participation of women in the workforce is the unavailability of reliable and affordable childcare services. These have yet to be developed in most countries, so families depend on mothers or grandparents for nurturing infants and children. Some private companies have started to provide day-care facilities for their employees, but these are very few. Increased support from governments is needed to develop services, including through policies that can incentivize private provision. Another solution proposed by the workshop was a community volunteering project, where parents living in condos would be encouraged offer a few hours of their time each week to look after their neighbours children after school on a rotating basis. This would create some free time for parents returning from work.

Another option could be to delegate the responsibility to paid workers – hiring housekeepers or professional childcare to support women. According to an ILO report, around 269 million new jobs could be created if investment in education, health and social work were doubled by 2030.

Others considered the value of workplace awards schemes, like Gender Equality Seals. This would incentivise private sector companies to promote flexible working hours, equal parental leave, and more stringent company policies around gender biases in the workplace. Maternal and paternal leave policies would also do much to allow mothers and fathers to better redistribute family and work responsibilities. Finally, participants considered the value of investments in technology, robotics, and AI to take over some of the work.

More data still needs to be collected in order to understand the implications unpaid care work has on their population’s human development, as well as their economies. While the monetary contribution of unpaid work is not calculated in national accounts, research and national surveys indicate that the value comprises 20 per cent to 60 per cent of GDP across countries in Asia and the Pacific. National surveys in this region point out that women spend 2 to 10 times more time in unpaid work compared to men; in countries like Cambodia and Pakistan the disparities are high, with women spending 9 times more time doing unpaid work. Time-use statistics, for one, would be critical for designing policies for inclusive growth.

However, solving the issue of unpaid work cannot just be done from the top down, and is arguably more to do with breaking ingrained attitudes. The ‘male breadwinner’ family model remains systemically entrenched in many societies, while women’s role as mothers or carers is still often considered biological rather than social. These stereotypical roles influence behaviours: the choices men and women make in their lives.

As a social norm, the problem of unpaid care and domestic work will take some time to solve. But if we can continue to challenge the ways our current societies operate, and recognize and value care and domestic work as a legitimate economic activity, perhaps we can move another step closer towards a more equal world.

Mailee Osten-Tan
Communications Officer, UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub
(mailee.ostentan@undp.org)