'care work done by poor women is worth 10.8 trillion US dollars: 3X bigger than whole tech industry'

Cross-posting by request of niyad:

Oxfam's 'Time to Care' report shows global wealth founded on inequality - Jan. 19, 2020


''underpaid and unpaid work by women and girls adds three times more to the global economy each year than the whole technology industry together.''

Lawson says Oxfam’s annual report examines the relationship “between billionaires and the super, super rich people at the top of the global economy, and the people at the bottom, particularly the hundreds of millions of poor women who spend billions of hours a day, in caring for the sick, caring for the elderly, cooking, cleaning…”

Unseen and unrewarded contribution by women
It’s a pun on the word “care”, he says, because “it’s this foundation of unpaid work done by the poorest women that generates enormous wealth for the economy.”

Lawson notes that in the report it is calculated that the combined contribution to the global economy of all this care work done by poor women is worth 10.8 trillion US dollars: that’s three times bigger than the whole tech industry - three times bigger than Google, Facebook, all of them put together.

“It is this unseen and unrewarded contribution by women that creates enormous wealth that is sucked upward into the bank accounts of the richest people and of the billionaires,” he says.

That wealth generated by the world’s poorest women, he explains, “is encapsulated and concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of people who are predominantly men.”

'Billionaire boom'
Lawson expresses his belief that the world would be much better off without the current “billionaire boom” phenomenon.

Gender equality and economic equality go hand in hand
Lawson concludes noting that the current economy, that gives an extreme amount of wealth to a tiny group of people at the top is also a deeply sexist economy: “It’s an economy that is built on the backs of women and of poor women and their labour, whether it’s poorly paid labour or even unpaid labour, it is a sexist economy and it’s a broken economy, and you can only fix the gap between the rich and the poor if at the same time you fix the gap between women and men.”

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/world/news/2020-01/oxfam-annual-report-unpaid-work-poor-women.html

https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/extreme-inequality-and-poverty/