Every society runs on two kinds of work.

The first is familiar. It has wages, uniforms, lunch breaks, performance reviews. It builds roads, writes code, teaches classes and treats patients. It shows up in GDP.

The second is harder to see but it what makes the first possible. Planning meals so everyone eats. Tracking what is running out at home. Caring for infants in the early hours of the morning. Supervising kid’s homework. Supporting ageing parents through appointments. Organising routines so children learn and adults can work. Remembering birthdays, medicines, school deadlines, festivals and family obligations so life stays whole.

This is care work. 

It looks different in different homes. In some it means negotiating with domestic staff, in others doing everything oneself. Some women coordinate multiple caregivers. Others are the only caregiver. Across families, the expectation that women will manage the invisible architecture of family life remains remarkably consistent.

Care is not sentimental labour. It is the infrastructure that allows people to show up at jobs, in classrooms, and in public life. Yet most countries, including India, tend to treat it as private matter rather than a shared economic concern.

India has no shortage of ambition. A five-trillion-dollar economy. Women-led development. Digital transformation. But we often forget to ask a foundational question: who is ensuring that the home continues to function while the nation marches forward.

The answer is visible in the data. India’s Time Use Survey shows women aged 15 to 59 spend more than seven hours each day on unpaid domestic and caregiving tasks. Men spend less than three. In urban India, the ratio is similar. On average, women do 2.6 times more unpaid care work than men — even when both are employed.

This gap shapes the labour market. India’s female labour force participation rate stands at 31.7 percent - below global averages despite rising levels of education and skill attainment among women. Women are not opting out of jobs. They are – inevitably – pulled out by responsibilities that the economy does not count.  

Macroeconomically, this is a silent engine. Government estimates place the value of women’s unpaid domestic and care work at 15–17 percent of GDP. A multi-trillion-rupee economic system depends on labour that receives neither pay nor protection.

This imbalance is not unique to India. The world has a long history of assuming that when care is needed, women will reorganise their lives to provide it. But India’s demographic size means that the consequences are magnified: when millions of women absorb unpaid care, millions of aspirations shrink.

The flip side is equally clear. Even modest public investment in care services can generate jobs and dramatically expand women’s workforce participation. The care economy sits at the intersection of gender equality, labour markets and growth.

Care systems cannot outrun social norms

Childcare centres, creches and caregiving services are essential. Yet too many operate with the same underlying assumptions: that women will manage enrolment, coordinate schedules, respond to disruptions and make sacrifices when care systems fall short.

When this happens, care infrastructure reduces women’s time burden without redistributing responsibility.

This is where masculinities matter, as economic variables - not just social ideals.

The current social script casts men primarily as earners. Care becomes something they “help with” rather than something they own as part of adulthood. The difference is profound. Helping keeps the hierarchy intact. Sharing redistributes power. This framing keeps women tied to unpaid work, even in the presence of formal care services.

Global evidence consistently shows that when men participate in daily caregiving - knowing the school calendar, managing the bedtime chaos, giving medicines, supporting emotional needs - women’s employment is more sustained, children’s wellbeing rises, and households report better stability. Care becomes a partnership rather than a silent burden.

But these shifts do not happen by accident. They require deliberate work to challenge norms around caregiving and responsibility. Transforming masculinities is not about isolated attitude change. It is about reshaping expectations across households, communities and institutions so that care is recognised as a shared social function.

UNDP India’s national campaign #GharSeShuru, launched during the 16 Days of Activism, builds on this insight. The campaign is grounded in a simple but often overlooked truth: progress on gender equality depends not only on laws and services, but on how responsibility is negotiated within households. Long before inequality shows up in employment data or economic indicators, it takes shape in everyday care arrangements at home.

From “supporting women” to building family infrastructure

Care is still often sold as help for working women. It is. But it is more than that.

Research on early childhood development shows that quality childcare boosts children’s cognitive growth, reduces long-term inequality and improves family wellbeing. Far from being a private favour to mothers, care services are public infrastructure, like transport or electricity - essential to functioning societies.

A care economy built on the assumption that women will permanently adapt around unpaid work is neither efficient nor resilient. Durable change requires households, employers and governments to expect men to engage in caregiving as a normal part of adult life.

When norms meet systems

This is where a comprehensive care-economy approach becomes critical, one that does not treat services, norms and policy as separate tracks.

UNDP India’s work with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs on strengthening the urban care ecosystem reflects this integrated thinking. Rather than focusing solely on childcare provision, the approach looks at care as a system: expanding access to quality, affordable childcare for low-income urban households; professionalising the childcare workforce; building partnerships across government, employers and communities; and using communication and behavioural nudges to encourage shared caregiving.

The emphasis on behaviour change is deliberate. Childcare services cannot redistribute care if families continue to believe that caregiving is primarily women’s responsibility. Simple design choices such as communicating with both parents, visibly engaging fathers in childcare centres, avoiding frames that present care as “helping women” can quietly shift expectations around who care is for.

Framing childcare as an investment in families, cities and human capital also helps reposition men from bystanders to participants.

Care, masculinities and India’s future

Every nation that has expanded women’s opportunities has had to reorganise how care is valued and shared. Those that treated care as public infrastructure saw women’s employment rise. Those that left it to households hit a ceiling.

India’s aspirations for inclusive growth and “women-led development” depend on how care is organised and valued. As long as unpaid care work remains heavily feminised, gains in employment and productivity will remain uneven and fragile.

Transforming masculinities is not peripheral to the care economy agenda; it is foundational to it. Without shifts in how care is understood and shared within households, investments in care services will ease pressure without dismantling the structures that created it.

A care economy that works for India’s future must rest on a simple premise: care is everyone’s responsibility. And meaningful change, as both evidence and experience remind us, really does have to start at home.

(Isabelle Tschan is Deputy Resident Representative, UNDP India and Sneha Pathak is Gender Analyst at UNDP India)