Care is fundamental to how societies function, but the work of providing it is seldom shared equally. Children need to be supervised, older people need care, and some people with disabilities might need assistance. Yet, more often than not, this care has been and continues to be provided informally within families, especially by women at the cost of their economic opportunities. Any apparent trade-off between women’s economic participation and care-reliant reproductive decisions is actually a false one, and that the variable missing from that framing could be effective care infrastructure.As per an OECD report, among older people who receive care, an average of 60% rely on informal sources. Several countries have high rates of care dependency yet small formal care sectors, with care responsibilities likely falling on the kin of the care receiver.Within these informal sources, care responsibilities are in most cases shouldered by female family members. Across countries, women spend anywhere between two to ten times the amount of time men do in unpaid care work. Progress on outcomes such as parity in pay is often contrasted by lacklustre progress on matters such as caregiving.Caregiving responsibilities cause disruptionsIn India, women spend a significant amount of their time in unpaid housework and care work; more so than men and across marital status, educational qualifications, or employment. Economist Shrayana Bhattacharya, in her book Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh paints a stark picture of the unpaid work done by women in India. Over two-thirds of women contribute to unpaid labour, putting in 3.26 billion hours of unpaid care work valued at Rs 19 lakh crore.Time is finite and caregiving can leave women with limited time for other activities like paid work, or even for rest and leisure. Participation in the formal economy takes the biggest hit when women are expected to choose between familial responsibilities and employment. A study by researchers from IIT-Guwahati found that 114.6 million women between the ages of 15 to 35 were absent from the labour market.Also read: How the Draft Social Security Rules Weaken Maternity Rights Caregiving responsibilities cause disruptions that lead women to withdraw from employment, reduce their number of working hours or take up flexible, but often insecure work. Pregnancy and childbirth can cause disruptions on their own, but it is the subsequent caregiving that follows, which is assumed as the sole responsibility of the women, that prolongs that disruption from months to years, and for many, also permanently. Nor is this care limited to their own children; women are also expected to look after ageing in-laws and other dependents in the marital home.Studies that have looked at data spanning multiple years have found strong evidence on the negative association between caregiving requirements and labour market participation. The presence of children below the age of six was negatively linked to employment of women. Another study that looked at a broad range of measures found motherhood to be negatively associated with labour market outcomes. Similar but adjacent concerns are emerging in high-income countries where senior care is not adequately supported by government policy.Trade off between women’s work and having children is not inevitableAt the same time, countries that have made strides on women’s participation in the economy and parity to men on various economic outcomes have seen birth rates decline over time. Gary Becker offers an explanation for this – though one that has been critiqued for its reductive view – where he frames the decision to have children similar to how we decide to buy goods and services, in that there are both explicit (food, clothing, education, and more for the child) and implicit (forgoing income earned from working) costs to having a child. Factors like access to education, employment, and fewer gender barriers increase these implicit costs, thereby reducing the demand for children. An experiment carried out in India that provided women with three-years of recruiting support found that women in treatment villages were more likely to work or pursue further post-school training and less likely to marry or have children during this period.Before addressing the choice presented between women’s participation and falling birth rates, it is important to understand why falling birth rates are a concern in the first place. Lower birth rates are not necessarily a bad thing and can even be desirable, especially when they’re above the replacement level. These can reduce the stress placed upon resources as well as the state, providing a level of demographic stability.Also read: What the Numbers Hide About Women’s Participation in the Labour ForceThe problem arises when birth rates fall and stay below the replacement level, leading to both a growing elderly population and a shrinking population. This situation can place a greater demand upon the state and young, working individuals and diminish the benefits from youth – like entrepreneurship and innovation.It is erroneous – and perhaps potentially malicious – to view women’s participation in the formal economy and birth rates as a choice between one of the two because it relies on the same flawed premise as Becker’s hypothesis on having children; that caregiving is solely an individual or household concern.Representative image of a mother and her child. Photo: Flickr/Sophie Burie (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED).Feminist economists like Nancy Folbre have critiqued Becker’s framework on this basis, arguing that seeing care as a household expense means not seeing it as it is: socially necessary work whose costs and benefits are distributed through families, markets, and the state. The trade off between women’s work and having children is not inevitable, and is in fact, manufactured by the kind of decisions societies take about who bears the burden of caregiving.The other reason it is erroneous is that there are a multitude of factors that affect women’s participation and birth rates. Safety, mobility, and cultural attitudes are other, equally important determinants of female labour force participation. While marriage and associated caregiving responsibilities can typically impede economic participation, studies have also noted how marriage can paradoxically also facilitate some women’s entry into the workforce; as women’s ability to work after marriage was often shaped by spousal consent and the arrangements within the marital household. The same paper that observed negative links between motherhood and labour market outcomes also noted that the strongest effect was for the so-called ‘fertility shock’, a gap between the desired and actual number of children, suggesting caregiving affects economic participation more so when it is unexpected than expected.Invest more in care economiesFalling birth rates are also driven by various other factors such as better education, knowledge of family planning, access to contraceptives, and most important of all mortality-reducing development. These changes reflect a shift in mentality as parents no longer face the same uncertainties about whether their children will survive childhood. An important factor that may shape women’s reproductive decisions and employment is the presence (or absence) of caregiving policies and infrastructure. Care needs don’t end at childhood; an ageing population requires the same infrastructure logic, and the same gendered reassignment of labour if it’s absent. These are not just limited to daycares, old age homes, and caretakers but also include funding for daycare facilities, mobile creches, gender-neutral childcare leaves, elder care services, professional training and more. The presence of affordable, accessible, and quality care for dependents can reduce childcare costs, reduce the burden of unpaid caregiving responsibilities borne by families, and potentially have various knock-on effects from reductions in the physical, mental, and emotional burdens of caring.A paper by a group of researchers trying to explain the puzzlingly low fertility rates and low female labour force participation – anomalous as per the Beckerian hypothesis – among Catholic countries found that the general withdrawal of childcare services had a noticeable impact on the birth rates among these countries. As per their hypothesis childcare services that had been typically provided by the church, specifically by nuns, declined as a consequence of attrition among nuns following the Second Vatican council. The evidence provided is compelling, every nun present is associated with the presence of 300-400 children. Ongoing research on subsidised care for the elderly suggests that provision of such care can be expensive in the short-run but can have positive effects on senior health outcomes and children’s labour market outcomes. Expanding the formal care sector can also generate additional employment and help to recognise and formalise work that has long remained unpaid. It can also drive additional employment from support or specialised roles required for formal care enterprises, professional training, and more. With a large youth population touted to be its demographic dividend yet falling birth rates, India faces a looming care crisis if it does not invest in its formal care economy. Recent focus on the care economy and the specific areas which need attention by the EAC-PM does suggest that policy perspectives may be moving away from a narrow view tied solely to maternal health to a broader, more holistic view.Countries that are dealing with falling birth rates, rapidly ageing populations, and depressed female labour force participation rates need to invest more into their respective care economies; especially at a time when alternate approaches to addressing the problem of changing demographics, such as labour-saving technologies and social support reforms, receive public backlash. From country to country the major challenges will be understanding the problem (what kind of care needs are there), targeting it (choice of interventions and public support), and most important of all uptake (transitioning away from gender-based informal care) – especially in countries with long histories of informal caregiving. This is critical because at the heart of this challenge is the broader question of justice: care infrastructure is not limited to being a policy matter, it directly affects how women in a country work, rest, age and live with dignity.Abhishek Vajjala is a reseracher at the Department of Economics and Muskan Soni is a researcher at the Department of Sociology at Monk Prayogshala, a not-for-profit academic research institution.