The case for investing in care

IT has been four years since the start of a life changing pandemic, but what lessons have we learnt from Covid-19 to make Malaysia more resilient?

One legacy of Covid-19 that isn’t sufficiently addressed is its impact on children’s development. The Asian Development Bank suggests that Malaysia is experiencing one of the highest learning losses regionally, with the exception of Myanmar. For some, this manifested in speech delays. Globally, Komodo Health found that speech delay diagnoses increased by 110% for children aged 0-12 following the pandemic in the United States. Malaysian parents have similarly reported observing speech delays following the pandemic.

Undoubtedly, this has a huge impact on families, who must invest additional time and resources to ensure their children can meet developmental milestones.

But is this impact shouldered equally by women and men?

In Malaysia, it is not the case that every member of a family equally takes on the responsibility to care for the family, be it children or elderly parents or those with disabilities. This often falls on the shoulders of women. Of those who said they were out of the labour force because of housework and family responsibilities in the labour force survey in 2022 by the Department of Statistics Malaysia, nearly 63% were women, compared to 2.3% of men. The PMX (Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim), in fact, has recently suggested a policy change which would further entrench this inequality, in offering flexible work options for female civil servants who have care responsibilities, for lesser pay.

Care is often touted as familial obligation and responsibility, yet it is a public good. More investment is needed to redistribute this responsibility, not just from women to men, but from families to government.

One of the most important policy documents that can facilitate this shift in investment is the national budget.

Can budgets be caring?

Broadly, the budget is a policy tool used to distribute or redistribute resources to achieve an outcome, be it economic or behavioural. For the past few years, the government has worked to shift a portion of care work away from families to the public sphere.

Many of these efforts focus on childcare. Childcare has been mentioned as far back as Budget 1994, but investments have become more coordinated and consistent. For example, in Budget 2021, we saw Rm30mil allocated to upgrade childcare facilities and Rm20mil for after-school community centres for children. In 2022, another Rm30mil was allocated to developing childcare services in government buildings. Modest tax reliefs for childcare were also included in Budgets 2022 and 2023.

This focus is unsurprising, as a lack of accessible childcare remains one of the main barriers for women who want to re-enter the workforce and the reason women tend to exit the workforce with no return. According to the National Child Data Centre (NCDC), we have a shortage of over 80,000 childcare centres in Malaysia, to match the population of children.

Additionally, women’s labour force participation rate has stagnated around 55% for the past few years.

The overall picture, then, suggests that investments in care are not yielding the returns anticipated.

So what’s missing?

The thread binding all women who make the decision to take care of children or ageing parents are gender norms which position women as natural caregivers. These stereotypes are also why daughters and wives are typically expected to undertake the cooking, cleaning, and management of a household. Undoubtedly, over Raya celebrations, one can easily observe the myriad of tasks women are expected to do – from cooking the rendang and lontong to weaving ketupat, to making sure guests are given enough to eat and drink. These inequalities, sown from an early age, have lifelong consequences and carry a socioeconomic cost, keeping women out of the formal workforce.

But women’s decision to stay out of the labour force is, in some ways, predictable. When a public good, such as care, is underfunded or undersupplied, the demand for that good does not necessarily disappear or decrease. Oftentimes, this responsibility is simply shifted onto women in the private sphere. The gender pay gap also reinforces this bias. When the costs of childcare and eldercare, for example, are high, it makes economic sense for a person who earns less and is stereotyped as naturally good at taking care of others, to be the one who sacrifices her career.

In 2022, a local news agency shared how one mother had to drop out of the formal workforce in order to support her two sons, both of whom are on the spectrum. But her story is one of many women who were forced to make the decision between being an unpaid care provider and having a career. These decisions are harder when a child has disabilities because supporting them can cost an additional RM20,000 a year or more.

This, despite how women have outperformed men in educational attainment, demonstrates how deeply rooted gender norms around care are. Gender norms shape these inequalities and are reinforced by our economic structures, which undervalues care work. Women, then, are profoundly impacted and limited by the decisions they can make based on who they are expected to take care of. This, of course, compounds for women who are single mothers or survivors of violence, as choices become more limited the more vulnerable a person is.

The budget, with the power to redistribute resources, can do more to support women by providing them with opportunities and options. Prof Dr Shanthi Thambiah, from Universiti Malaya’s Gender Studies Department, notes how budgetary investment in care is still relatively low, especially compared to other forms of infrastructure, meaning that we are unable to meet the growing demand for care services.

According to Prof Shanthi, “Investing in care infrastructure will have a positive economic impact, as we should be able to see a return on investment in terms of growth for the country and a trickle down effect on job creation in the care economy. This signifies the urgency to centre care in our economic planning and development, which will exponentially impact the country’s economic, social, and emotional well-being.”

Women can be caregivers just as much as they can be breadwinners – but to do so we need access to supportive care structures. Policies empowering caregivers of children and ailing, elderly, or disabled family members must be in place to ensure they do not lose out economically. For example, providing a caregivers’ allowance or creating more community care centres through the national budget.

Ultimately, investing in care is investing in gender equality, which is a means of honouring the government’s commitment to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5. Only through this can we build a society where our caregiving responsibilities are equally shared; where care is deeply valued and where men and boys want to make the rendang and sit down with us to weave the ketupats.

Anis Farid is Research Project Manager at Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO), overseeing the RE:CARE Project, which is looking into building the resilience of the care workforce and infrastructure in Malaysia for future crisis-preparedness. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.