Rosie moved into our ramshackle house 25 years ago, completely independent, and a fabulous support when we had school-aged children. A decade later, my parents threw their lot in with us, too. We bought a neglected and damp Edwardian pile around the corner, which had once been a care home. As my father’s Parkinson’s threatened to become more severe, we would need ramps, grab rails, widened doorways. And I would learn how to be a carer.

“Carer” is a tricky word. It’s a noun that brings with it a hint of transaction, of imbalance. The NHS defines it as anyone who looks after someone who “cannot cope without their support”, and clarifies: “The care they give is unpaid.” This definition is all the more uncomfortable if you are caring for someone you love.

First, I was supporting my mother caring for my father; then watching over her as she negotiated life without him; finally, after my Ma died, I became Granny Rosie’s full-time “extra pair of hands”, as she puts it. Each act has been one of love, but it has also been tough and distressing. It is challenging, caring for those who once cared for you, managing the physical and sometimes mental life without a loss of dignity, the tiredness and the loss of privacy. And it is endless. Being a carer is about meeting someone else’s needs, every single day, at all hours. If you can’t be there all the time, it’s about finding someone who can — a neighbour, a relative, a friend.

Many people, finding the relentless struggle impossible, have to leave their jobs. A spike in the number of people giving up work to care for family members was reported last year — 84% of them women. Most carers talk about feeling guilty whatever they do — that terrible disappointment on a beloved father’s face when the visit is over too soon, the falsely bright goodbye from a mother who is refusing to give in. The feeling, when you are caring for someone with dementia, when they can’t even recognise your face anymore.

On top of the emotional challenges are the practical ones, the financial ones. How do you agree with siblings over whether an ageing parent needs a residential home or a paid carer? Where do you turn, when you can afford neither to leave your job nor pay someone to care for a beloved relative? When there is so little state support on offer?

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Without unpaid carers, the NHS would collapse. There are 10.6 million of us in the UK, and we save the government £162 billion per year in England and Wales. (For context, in 2020-21, the NHS received an estimated £164 billion per year in funding.) Despite this, the Carer’s Allowance is only a measly £76.75 per week (up from last year’s £69.70). To qualify, you have to spend at least 35 hours a week caring for someone: a fulltime job. If an extra £7 a week seems paltry, consider the Carer’s Leave Act, which is about to come into force. It will give employees the right to take leave to provide care — unpaid — for a mere five days. But if carers withdrew their labour, the system would simply collapse. Hospital beds would be flooded, care homes would be unable to cope with the influx, the NHS would crack under the strain.

When the Dilnot Commission on Funding of Care and Support was published in 2011, one of its key recommendations was that there should be a cap placed on an individual’s contributions towards their own care. The figure was set at £35,000. The intention was to protect those who have spent their working lives paying National Insurance contributions from the sort of “extreme” care costs that would force them to sell their homes. The asset threshold for those in state-funded residential care should, it suggested, increase from £22,500 to £100,000. There should be greater integration between health and social care services, and better information for care users. The Commission was thorough, it was fair, and it achieved royal assent in 2015.

But nearly 13 years on — and despite the tough lessons taught by the pandemic — almost none of the Dilnot Commission’s key recommendations has been implemented. Cameron, May and Johnson all stalled. Theresa May changed the name of the Department of Health to the Department of Health and Social Care in 2018, as a nod to better integration. But, as in so many government departments, this one has seen a revolving door of ministers, who have made few lasting changes. Now, Britain’s care system is at breaking point. There is no fairness in who pays what; there is no plan for those who do not have children to step in and help, or those whose families are estranged or living too far away. As the NHS remains starved of funds — Rishi Sunak has just announced the “most radical” reform in NHS history: his plan to make £10 billion in savings — the situation is only worsening. In May, the Prime Minister killed off the Conservatives’ flagship social care plan.

Social care is not seen as a vote-winner. I’d hazard that this is at least partly because care is seen as a women’s issue. By the age of 46, women have a 50% chance of being a carer. Men don’t have equivalent odds until they are 57, which suggests that men mostly care for their partners, whereas women care for everyone. And though there are men actively campaigning in this field, the blunt fact is that the majority of carers, paid or unpaid, are women, and the vast majority of legislators are men. In September 2020, at the beginning of the period of local, tiered lockdowns, not a single woman attended Cobra meetings, and there was not one female nurse on the Sage Cobra team. If the Government is going to address the crisis in care, it needs to listen to those actually providing it. The trouble is we often don’t see the point in complaining. We just get on with it.

There is also a growing number of young carers looking after parents or siblings — the Children’s Society estimated in 2021 there might be as many as 800,000 carers between the ages of 5 and 17. If they have managed to stay in school, they are often alienated from their classmates because of the unpredictability of their lives. There are few advocating for this often invisible group of carers. Those that do, for instance the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Young Carers and Young Adult Carers, have little power to effect change.

Carers are everywhere, hidden in plain sight. Most of us, even if we long for compassionate support from the Government, take on the role willingly, regardless of the consequences to ourselves. I am lucky: I didn’t have to give up my job to become a carer, but many have no choice, and find themselves pushed further to the margins of society. The current political narrative is that a valuable life is a “productive” one — one that makes the nation money. It belittles both those who give care and those who receive it. It ignores the fact that women and men who have spent their lives contributing to society deserve to be looked after, not seen as a burden, or a “trouble”.

It’s partly sexual, of course: a woman aged 50, however stylish or attractive, is unlikely to get the same level of male attention as a woman in her 20s. For many, this is a blow to self-esteem, but the consequences aren’t confined to personal feeling. Youth and sexual attractiveness remain an undeniable form of currency in the world, and in certain professional settings they are disproportionately valued — even more in women than in men. We are all familiar with the long-preferred pairing of the grizzled male newsreader with the younger, highly-groomed female counterpart. Not that younger women aren’t competent. But the professional qualities that accrue with age as palpable advantages in men — knowledge, contacts, experience — count for less in women. Instead, ageing often renders them professionally “invisible”.

It’s not only a question of age. The broader erasure of women, both young and old — along with everything associated with them — has become something of a publishing phenomenon. Caroline Criado Perez kicked it off with her best-selling Invisible Women: Exploring Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, in which she used a wealth of research to illustrate how big “data gaps” around women and their needs has led to a world predominantly designed around a “default man”. Everything from car and seatbelt design to the inadequate floor-space allocated for women’s toilets lead to worse outcomes for women: we wait in a much longer queue for public lavatories and, if unlucky enough to be involved in a car crash, are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, and 17% more likely to die.

Following Criado Perez, and featuring a quote from her on the cover, is a new book by the London-based Swedish journalist Katrine Marçal: Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored In An Economy Built For Men (out tomorrow). It expands on the hot topic of women being ignored, but delves into its own territory: how technological innovation has traditionally been seen as a male pursuit, resulting in female inventors being written out of history and new proposals being downgraded.

Marçal has a knack for pulling out sharp insights and illustrative stories. She tells the tale of Bertha Benz, who — without informing her husband Karl — manoeuvred the early automobile, or “horseless carriage,” he had built out of the factory — and took it on a trip to a town 90km away. Along the way she used a hatpin to clear a fuel pipe blockage and a garter to insulate an exposed ignition wire; and invented the world’s first brake linings by getting a shoemaker to cover the troublesome brake blocks with leather. But then, Bertha had a personal interest in proving that the “horseless carriage” worked: she had invested her entire dowry in the enterprise.

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What repeatedly emerges in Mother of Invention is the complex collaboration, often between traditionally ‘male’ and ‘female’ skills, that permits technological innovation to happen. Expert seamstresses, for instance, worked with NASA to make the soft, 21-layer space suits that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong wore for the first moon-landing. ILC, the company that made the suits, understood “that sewing was a technology, and that soft things can perform hard functions.” Yet while an emergent technology may rely on women as a work force, once it becomes successfully established, a new narrative often emerges — one in which the work becomes higher status, better paid, and increasingly designated as “instinctively” suited to men.

The first “computers”, Marçal writes, were women: banks of relatively low-paid female employees who sat for hours at a time doing calculation work. By the 1900s, the industry was female-dominated: the University of Pennsylvania alone employed more than 200 women as “computers”. In the war years, women made up 75% of the workforce at Bletchley Park, where they worked on cracking the Enigma code. Indeed, when the engineers there built the “world’s first electronic, programmable computer,” it was operated by female volunteers from the Women’s Royal Naval Service: in essence the first programmers.

At some point in the 1960s, however, the tide turned. As computers became increasingly central to industries and government, a campaign drive was launched to recruit “promising young men from the right social class.” The women who knew how to program were now “tasked with training up the young men to effectively become their own bosses.” With little prospect of promotion, women began to leave computing in droves, and a wealth of experience was lost.

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It was not the first sea-change in sex and status within an industry — the historical shift in “secretaries” from male to predominantly female was another — and Marçal also makes an interesting point about what might be waiting in the future. The growing sophistication of AI and the looming “second machine age”, she says, could redistribute work status in a fundamental way. Robots — like Deep Blue, the computer that beat Garry Kasparov at chess — are good at “thinking” but bad at anything that requires complex physical movement, emotional intelligence or unpredictable situations. Work such as caring for children and the elderly, or cleaning houses, is therefore the least likely to be replaceable by a robot. Could it be that so-called “soft skills” will rise in prestige, and see male competition for entry?

Nothing can happen without this work. Those in jobs which offer the highest prestige, top earnings and longest hours are dependent on a raft of others: a compliant (usually female) partner who is willing to either perform or outsource a greater proportion of the domestic burden; a nanny, to help with the children; a carer, to look after elderly parents; a secretary, to manage appointments; restaurant staff, to make work-related entertaining possible, and so it goes on. Yet these essential jobs — disproportionately done by women — are relatively low-status.

The disparity of professional status between men and women, and why it might exist, is the central concern of Mary Ann Sieghart’s new book The Authority Gap (out 1st July). It opens with an uncomfortable moment between Mary McAleese, then President of the Republic of Ireland, and Pope John Paul II. As McAleese was on the point of introduction to the pontiff, he walked past her to introduce himself instead to her husband, and asked him, “Would you not prefer to be President of Ireland rather than married to the President of Ireland?’ The “joke” went down understandably badly with President McAleese (it can’t have felt great for her husband either). It’s an example, Sieghart argues, of the way in which women are “underestimated, talked over, ignored, patronized and generally not taken as seriously as a man”.

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She collates an impressive bank of research to drive home the point, with some interesting social experiments: when social scientists sent out applications for a lab manager position to male and female science professors at top universities, identical save for the “randomly assigned” male or female names at the top, the professors — including the women — rated the “male” applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the “female” one. Students taking an online course rated their instructor more highly if they thought they were being taught by a man. And identical CVs with a man’s name at the top were more likely to lead to a job offer.

The experience of trans people strengthens her case. The trans men cited in the book found that their authority went up after transitioning, along with their pay: as men, people generally accorded them more respect and approval. The trans women had the opposite experience: post-transition, many were shocked suddenly to find themselves being talked over, queried and assumed to be incompetent. They had been used to different treatment.

Women in the very top jobs report that they are insulated from such negative behaviour by the authority that comes with the role itself. The book does succeed in demonstrating, however, that — below a certain professional level — many men and women have difficulty accepting female authority. Yet there are also men who are very supportive of female colleagues, and I did often find myself questioning whether it is valuable for professional women to nurse outrage over mildly insensitive comments, rather than simply ridicule or ignore them. The amplification of silly remarks, so that others might share performatively in the horror, has become fashionable. The author describes a dinner in which the older male banker beside her asks what she does, and she duly lists six impressive elements of her “portfolio career,” from sitting on the council of the Tate Modern to writing a political column. Perhaps stunned by this deluge of achievement, the banker replied, “Wow, you’re a busy little girl!” A bit patronising, yes. But the outraged Sieghart describes it as “probably the most egregious example of being (literally) belittled that I can recall” and ends up complaining about it on Twitter.

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Status is inextricably linked to respect, pay and promotion, meaning the absence of it has material and psychological effects. It makes sense to want it. But there is a distinction between the professional authority that derives from seeking to do a job properly, and the egotistical authority that craves a particular reverence from those around you. The former is more admirable, but the latter is what often drives ambitious employees to ask for pay rises, apply for the top job, and treat not just the work itself but their own position with the greatest seriousness. Some people get to the top of hierarchies because it is the most effective way to have control over their work, others because they enjoy dominance over others. Although a dollop of ego is often a professional necessity, philosophically there is something faintly ludicrous about regarding a status achieved at work as a just reflection of one’s essential worth.

There’s sometimes a whiff of this tendency in “fifty of the world’s most powerful, successful and authoritative women,” whom Sieghart interviews for the book (invariably mentioning their startling intelligence). Frances Morris, the Director of Tate Modern, laments how, “As director of Tate Modern, I can spend all day as a powerful, articulate person who’s taken seriously, and I can leave this building and I am nobody. Because as a woman in the world out there, I’m not taken seriously.”

But isn’t that simply life? At home we have to unload the dishwasher and pay the bills. At parties we make conversation with people who have no idea what we do. We are all our context, to some extent. And the drug of workplace importance has a limited efficacy for men too: a month after retirement a male CEO will no doubt find himself in the garden centre, a silver-haired man in a baseball cap staring at a pair of garden shears, wondering where all the phone calls went. And if women are sometimes held back by bias, then strong social expectations of what a man should be, including successful and dominant in the workplace, also take their toll on the male psyche — something which may be reflected in the higher rate of male suicide.

The testimony in The Authority Gap is often interesting, and many of the social syndromes it identifies are recognisable. But it is mainly focused on the nuances of female status in the upper echelons of politics, business and the media. It eloquently describes the frustration of a higher-status woman being mistaken for a lower-status one, for example. Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former Danish PM, was confused with a secretary when she was an MEP. Dawn Butler, a black Labour MP, was told by a fellow MP, in a comment compounded by racial bias: “This lift really isn’t for cleaners.”

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That focus only takes us part-way. One step forward will indeed come when men stop making uninformed assumptions about the roles that women around them play. But the next step will come — as Marçal’s book suggests — when the gulf in status between MPs and the secretaries and cleaners who make their jobs possible itself starts to narrow.

But it’s just as possible to step backwards as forwards. These books, which emphasise the historical precariousness of female power, have been published at a time when a rapacious market is more alert than ever to the cash-generating properties of female bodies. A number of US states have already legalised commercial surrogacy, for example, while a multi-billion pound porn industry churns out increasingly violent sexual images which have consequences in real-life behaviour: impoverished women especially are seen as holes to be drilled and wombs to be filled.

At the same time a belligerent “progressive” agenda is performing its own reduction in the name of “inclusion”, pressing for resonant words such as  “woman” and “mother” to be removed from institutional language that emphasises functionality: “people who give birth” or “menstruators”. Should women choose to express the view that their biological sex is meaningful and immutable, they are publicly shamed and threatened online with rape and other violence, while men who make similar points are generally left alone. A number of organisations have been startlingly eager to join in the punitive enforcing of “acceptable speech” for women.

In just a few years, with little official acknowledgment, the treatment of women in society has transformed into something chilling, surreal and often poisonous. And I can’t help thinking that, as things stand, these thoughtful, data-driven and necessary books about nuance and bias are a little like talking about redesigning a forest park in the middle of a wildfire. In the current cultural climate, many women are, quite rationally, now deciding that to be an invisible woman is the safest option they have.

What the pay gaps expose, more than anything else, is the lack of women in senior positions in most organisations. Some will argue progress is being made, citing, for example, the increasing proportion of women on the boards of the UK’s 100 biggest companies. But that hasn’t happened unaided, and the numbers largely reflect the appointment of more female non-executive directors, who often sit on multiple boards. The proportion of senior women executive directors in boardrooms has barely changed in a decade, and is still below 10%. And the proportion of senior business posts more generally held by women in the UK actually fell 2% last year, to 19%.

It is not that women are less ambitious. But their social conditioning plays a part. A recent study  looked at the attitudes of women in China who grew up under the communist regime where gender equality was emphasised, compared to the attitudes of those who grew up during the post-1978 reform era or in capitalist Taiwan.[1. Alison Booth, Elliott Fan, Xin Meng and Dandan Zhang, ‘Gender Differences in Competitiveness: Evidence from China’, Royal Economic Society conference, March 2018] It found that those exposed to strong messages of gender equality, even for a short period, were more competitively inclined: culture and institutions matter in women’s willingness to compete.

Where capitalism fails to provide an environment conducive to equality, communism seems, at least on the surface, to get much closer. This is not to defend communism as a system, women in communist states such as the former Soviet Union who struggled to acquire the basic necessities for their family did not enjoy a better life. But what they did enjoy was an equal expectation that they would work, underpinned by free childcare, education and training. According to a New York Times investigation, male chauvinism in the Warsaw Pact countries was seen as a remnant of the pre-socialist era. And although wage disparities were still prevalent, women were represented in bigger numbers in senior positions.

Why are senior women role models lacking under capitalism?

The Anglo-Saxon capitalist system as practised in the UK and the US tends to favour aiming for short-term returns, driven by increased quarterly reporting and continued analysts’ scrutiny. Institutional investors themselves often contribute to the excessively short-term focus by corporate boards.[2. Davis, Lukpmnik and Pitt-Warson, What They Do With Your Money, Yale, 2016] Bringing about the cultural change required to make women want to stay at work and fully use their skills doesn’t fit with that model – it requires dedication and long-term investment in childcare, training, and incentives to encourage women to go back to work (for example using “returnship” programmes). It also means fundamentally altering the way an organisation works, including the way men structure their days and their attitudes towards women co-workers.

This is an obvious market failure where talents are lost to the economy because the system doesn’t respond in an efficient way. Skills are a major contributor to productivity – in fact the most important one. And it is productivity that determines an economy’s long term sustainable growth rate and prosperity. But as with Corporate Social Responsibility, or caring for the environment, we know that even though acting in accordance with those principles makes good long-term business sense, firms won’t do it unless pushed – just look at how long it has taken to increase the proportion of women on boards despite the evidence that diverse teams perform better.

Some people will explain away this gender disparity by blaming women’s reproductive tendencies. But that is only half the story – there is ample documented evidence of both conscious and unconscious bias in organisations which discriminates against women irrespective of whether they are mothers. One 2014 survey for example found that  40% of managers were wary of hiring “women of childbearing age”. And according to a 2018 YouGov survey one third of senior managers think it is acceptable to ask women in interviews whether they intend to have children. Indeed a quarter of women have been asked, at work, whether they plan to have children.

Business culture and practice is the problem, not women having children

That is not to ignore the fact that many women do choose to take time out of the workplace to have children. But the cost to them is significant. A 2016 report by the Institute for Fiscal studies showed that when women enter the labour force the gap in mean average hourly pay between men and women is virtually non-existent. By the time women are in their late 20s, the gap has risen to 10%, and it continues rising steadily thereafter. For mothers the gap carries on increasing to 33% by year 12 after the birth of their first child. Those mothers miss out on workplace skills and experience, and therefore promotion prospects, and that is especially the case if they return to work part time. The economy loses out permanently as the system does not seem to either value them or want to invest in them on their return ­– which is a double loss given firms have already invested in the training and development of those women.

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Childcare provision is key to tackling this female brain-drain. Evidence from Germany suggests that where regional or local government provided childcare is available it allows women to both earn higher salaries and progress up the career path more easily.[3. Vidhi Chhaochharia, ‘Childcare policies boost women’s wages and careers: Evidence from Germany’, Royal Economic Society’s annual conference at the University of Sussex, March 2018] A study of mothers in Italy showed that those who decided to shorten their maternity leave taking advantage of state-subsidised childcare were much less likely to leave the labour market and thus be lost to the economy.[4. Enrica Maria Martino, ‘The labour cost of motherhood: Evidence from Italy’, Royal Economic Society’s annual conference at the University of Sussex in Brighton in March 2018] And of course childcare can pay its way over the long term. Women who work earn more, receive less in benefits, consume more, and pay more direct and indirect taxes than would otherwise be the case.

Women will still want to have the flexibility to look after children – but so would many men if the long-hours culture which tends to put women off, yet still seems to be the route to promotion, was discouraged. Macho enclaves that still frown upon flexible working should have no place in the modern workplace.

As Cambridge University Professor Mary Beard has pointed out, mechanisms that sever women from the centres of power are deeply embedded in Western culture.[5. Mary Beard, ‘Women & Power’, Profile Books, 2017] Every meaningful change in the UK has required state intervention – the Equal Pay Act, the Equality Act, Pay Audits, etc. As long as the system prevents women from achieving economic equality, gender power imbalances will remain. #MeToo and similar movements are not going to fix that.

All these problems have a common cause that economists have so far failed to grasp: the crisis in care. Care is that concern which distinguishes us from robots. It’s what leads us to make decisions that otherwise look irrational. And, frustratingly for researchers, it’s really tricky to capture.

But what goes on in the public sphere – that pay gap, that growth slowdown – cannot be understood without first understanding care. Which means we can’t understand what goes on in the public sphere until we understand life at home.

A short history of care

For centuries the household and the workplace were often one and the same thing, blurring the boundaries between production and reproduction. With the Industrial Revolution, ‘work’ shifted out of the home and into the factory. New industries and new technologies favoured a combination of brute strength and capital – as famously depicted in the murals of artists like Benton. The Male Breadwinner Model was born, and alongside it, the ‘feminisation’ of the home: men earned and women cared. Production was remunerated in money, whilst reproduction was remunerated in social esteem and virtue. And when women did work outside the home, such as in the “dark satanic mills” of the Greater Manchester cotton industry, commentators decried the “destruction of the family” and the de-feminisation of women.

Karl Marx, famously not a supporter of women’s equality, lamented the loss of free domestic labour that women’s labour market participation represented. Dr Hawkins, factory surgeon and inspector, noted in 1833 that the working wives of the industrialising cities “fall remarkably short of the usual characteristics of the English wife”. Those women were not fulfilling their domestic duties “no cookery, no washing, no making, no mending, no decencies of life, no invitations to the fire-side.”

“Family wages for men” was the trade union cry, and by the middle of the twentieth century, the separate spheres of production and reproduction had been crystallised by the state. Rather than using growing tax-revenues to support women’s re-entry into the workforce by ‘socialising’ care, policy measures were built on the assumption that women were housewives, like the daily school timetable which made anything other than part-time work near impossible or pensions which rewarded male wages more than female ones. But by the 1980s, the marriage of liberal feminism with pro-market thinking resulted in the double-earner family, which contracted out care to an army of low-wage cleaners and nannies, often from overseas.

This marketisation of care has not, however, provided a complete solution, particularly for families who cannot afford to purchase care through the market. The great contradiction of capitalism, as academic Nancy Fraser has shown, is that it both requires care but also makes its provision increasingly difficult.[2. Nancy Fraser, ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care’, New Left Review, 2016]

Economic models have failed to take account of care

The public sphere is only as strong as the private foundations upon which it is built. That’s the lesson behind the famous feminist saying: ‘personal is political’. Addressing the numerous problems in the economy means breaking down the traditional division between the home and the public sphere, because, as feminist economists such as Marilyn Waring and Nancy Folbre have pointed out, production in the market depends on care within the home.[2. Nancy Folbre, The invisible heart – economics and family values, 2001; Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted, 1988] ‘Personal is political’.

Yet the mathematical models so beloved of economists fail to recognise this. Instead they rely on the notion that private individuals make rational decisions about how much to work and what to spend their earnings on. It is like a science fiction world in which we are all robots – there is no love, no sex, no power and no emotions. We are assumed to be economically active and to have no dependence on – or responsibility for – anyone else.

But we are not robots, and care is vital to our existence. Not just in childhood and old age, or even in times of illness, but through the care we receive from our loved ones every single day. It is care that reproduces the human race, that sees us through periods when we are most vulnerable and that makes the daily grind just about manageable.

While economists focus on independence, individualism and reason, care involves the polar opposite: dependence, relationships and emotion.[4. Susan Himmelweit, ‘The prospects for caring’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2017] Altruism, reciprocity and responsibility for others all feature. The economic model upon which policy decisions have been taken is highly flawed, and that has led to a crisis in care.

The Crisis of Care is a barrier to economic and social progress

The economic gains from women’s (re)entry into the workforce over the past century cannot be understated, in fact estimates suggest further great gains if that trend continues.[1. Citi Group Report, ‘Women in the Economy II’, November 2017] However, as women have entered the workforce, the care gap that has opened up as a result is creating daily stress and strain in the lives of so many working families.

It can be seen in the double burden women carry in working and providing the vast majority of care within the home. Which is both hindering women’s ability to achieve greater equality in the labour market and leading to the increasing health problems we see related to the stress of juggling care and paid work. In the UK, according to the British Social Attitudes Survey the typical woman spends 36 hours a week on unpaid work in the home, compared to 18 hours for men.[2. Jacqueline Scott and Elizabeth Clery, ‘Gender Roles: an incomplete revolution’, British Social Attitudes 30, 2013]

And this failure to factor in care needs, and therefore develop adequate market or public-sector solutions, is contributing to fertility rates falling below population replacement levels – the result of a ‘baby strike’ as women reject that double burden of earner and domestic caregiver.[3. Victoria Bateman, ‘The coming pressure on professional women’, Bloomberg View, 2016]

It also risks increasing inequality between poorer and richer women: richer families can contract care out in a way that poorer families cannot afford to.

The social and economic impact of the failure to value care, to anticipate the care gap, and to plan accordingly can also be seen in the care industry itself. Care has historically been undervalued – taken for granted – and so, when provided through the market, has been relatively lowly paid. And the inherent difficulty in raising productivity in a sector so dependent on personal interactions, so labour-intensive, helps to explain why despite significant market expansion pay remains so low.[5. Victoria Bateman, ‘How to make the service economy really deliver’, Bloomberg View, 2016]

This, of course, has wider economic and social implications. Families struggling to make ends meet on low pay, suffering from in-work poverty, have associated health and welfare costs. And the low pay care sector not only acts as a general drag on productivity, but families employed within it are limited in their ability to spend and save.

Were it not for economists’ neglect of care, many of these problems could have been anticipated. And anticipating them would have been key to avoiding them. Only by bringing care centre stage will we be able to place the economy – and, more importantly, people’s wellbeing – on a stronger footing. It’s time to put care at the heart of economic thinking.