Beyond the Household Walls: Unpaid Care Work, Intersectionality and the Fight for Gender Justice in Sri Lanka.

Every year on October 29th, the global community observes the International Day of Care and Support. Proclaimed by the UN General Assembly, this vital observance highlights a fundamental truth that our societies often take for granted: care is the invisible infrastructure that sustains human life, communities and economies.

Yet, as we mark this day in 2026, we must confront an uncomfortable reality. Across the world – and acutely in Sri Lanka – the heavy lifting of this essential work is profoundly gendered. It rests almost entirely on the shoulders of women, functioning as an unacknowledged subsidy to the national economy, a shadow economy, at the direct expense of women’s rights, well-being, justice and liberation.

The Invisible Engine: Unpaid Care Work and Women in Sri Lanka.

In Sri Lanka, deeply entrenched social norms and patriarchal expectations dictate that women are naturalized as primary caregivers, while men are viewed primarily as the breadwinners of the household. On any given day, a woman’s routine extends far beyond a standard workday. It encompasses a never-ending cycle of direct and indirect care: cooking, cleaning, washing, fetching water, caring for children, caring for and supporting elderly parents, nursing or disabled family members.

Field Research conducted by the Women and Media Collective paints a very stark picture of this. Our time-use surveys carried out across multiple districts in Sri Lanka revealed that women routinely spend close to 19 hours per day on average on household care responsibilities. This is in complete contrast to men who only spent an average of 10 hours per day on household care responsibilities.

This divide in time-use shows that unpaid care work isn’t merely about “helping out”: it is intensive, round-the-clock labour that leaves little to no room for rest, leisure or self-care. When household work is treated as a natural obligation that women must fulfil rather than real, valuable work, we effectively normalise women’s subordination in both the private and public spheres.

The Intersecting Web: How the Care Burden Shapes Women’s Realities

This disproportionate burden of unpaid care work does not exist in a vacuum. It interacts with and aggravates nearly every major systemic and structural challenge that women face in Sri Lanka today:

Women’s Economic Justice

One of the clearest consequences of unequal care burdens is women’s exclusions from economic opportunities.

Despite major achievements in education, Sri Lanka continues to have one of the lowest female labour force participation rates in South Asia. The Asia Development Bank notes that only one in every three women is active in the paid labour force, while unpaid care work burdens remain among the key barriers to women’s economic participation.

The International Labour Organisation reports that 73.5% of working-age women in Sri Lanka are outside the labour force, compared with just 26.5% of men, once again with household care responsibilities and care work identified as major contributing factors.

This is not because women lack skills, ambition or qualifications. Rather, women are routinely expected to absorb the very-real cost of inadequate childcare systems, eldercare services, healthcare provisions and social protection mechanisms.

Thus many women are forced to forego formal employment entirely or are forced to choose vulnerable, low-paying informal sector jobs that only offer flexibility in exchange for job security and fair wages.

Time Poverty and Unequal Access to Opportunity

Unpaid care work creates what scholars have long referred to as time poverty. When women spend long hours caring for children, elderly relatives, family members with disabilities and maintaining households, there is less time available for education, skills development, community engagement, leisure and rest.

These impacts begin early.

UN Women notes that during periods of economic hardship and rising household care needs, girls are the most vulnerable to interruptions in education because they are expected to sacrifice their education in order to contribute additional unpaid care work at home.

When girls and women thus spend a majority of their day doing household chores, they miss out on crucial windows for higher education, vocational training and professional development. This lack of opportunity and even access locks women into generational cycles of economic dependency.

Limited opportunities today transform into reduced access, income, autonomy and decision-making power tomorrow.

Political Participation and the Politics of Care.

Care is also a political issue.

Women’s continued underrepresentation in political institutions cannot be separated from the unequal distribution of care within households and communities.

Participation in public life requires time, mobility, resources and support. When women are expected to carry the bulk of unpaid care work, opportunities to engage in community leadership, trade unions, local government, political organising and electoral politics become constrained.

Simultaneously, the absence of women from decision-making spaces often means that care itself remains politically invisible.

Who looks after the elderly? Who supports persons with disabilities? Who cares for children? Who performs household labour when public services fail?

The answer to these questions are more often than not women. Yet care work rarely receives the same policy attention afforded to infrastructure, finance or economic growth.

Care is not merely a private matter. It is a public, political and economic concern that should be central to policy making.

Unpaid Care Work, Violence, and Women’s Safety

Economic dependency and unequal power relations can heighten women’s vulnerability to violence.

When unpaid care responsibilities limit women’s access to income, employment, and social networks, leaving abusive situations becomes more difficult. Financial insecurity remains a significant barrier to safety and autonomy.

Care burdens can also increase stress, exhaustion, and social isolation, particularly for women caring for multiple family members with limited support systems.

The burden of unpaid care work therefore is not just an economic issue. As an issue both informed by and contributing to social norms and patriarchal expectations, reducing and redistributing the burden is a critical matter of improving women’s bodily autonomy, freedom and safety as well as helping to break down the cultural and social norms that engender violence against women in Sri Lanka.

Care, Sexual and Reproductive Health, and Bodily Autonomy.

Unpaid care responsibilities often come at the expense of women’s own wellbeing.

Many women routinely prioritise the needs of children, partners, elderly relatives, and extended family members over their own healthcare. The demands of caregiving can delay medical consultations, reduce access to reproductive healthcare, limit opportunities for rest and recovery after childbirth, and contribute to physical and emotional burnout.

We need to reject the expectation that women must endlessly give of themselves while their own needs often become invisibilised and marginalised.

Women’s health, wellbeing, reproductive autonomy and dignity must be recognised as essential components of any truly just care system.

Disability Justice and Care.

Disability justice compels us to think about care differently.

Women frequently undertake unpaid care for family members with disabilities while simultaneously facing their own barriers to employment, healthcare, education, and public participation. Women with disabilities themselves may encounter significant unmet care and support needs due to inaccessible services and infrastructure.

Building disability-inclusive care systems is a must but also requires us to move beyond assumptions that families, especially women, can endlessly absorb care responsibilities without adequate public investment and support.

Care and Climate Justice.

The relationship between unpaid care work and climate justice is increasingly impossible to ignore.

When floods, droughts, heat waves, food insecurity, water shortages, and public health crises affect communities, the work required to sustain everyday life increases. And across Sri Lanka, it is women who are frequently the first responders within the family during such climate-related disruptions. They are the ones that absorb these additional burdens.

Women care for children when schools close, they support relatives who fall ill, secure food and water during shortages, clean and rebuild homes following floods, provide physical and emotional support to family members going through displacement and loss. Much of this labour remains unpaid and invisible, despite being absolutely vital to community survival and recovery.

This is the ‘hidden infrastructure’ of climate resilience.

From the climate justice perspective, this reality raises important questions about fairness and responsibility. Women’s caregiving labour becomes a form of adaptation in the event of climate crises yet it is rarely recognised or discussed in climate policies, disaster preparedness plans, recovery programs or climate financing frameworks.

Care must be placed at the centre of feminist climate policy. Environmental sustainability and gender justice are deeply interconnected. Building climate resilience also requires investing in public infrastructure that reduce care burdens during and after climate disasters, ensuring women’s meaningful participation in environment decision-making and integrating care considerations into climate adaptation and recovery planning.

Moving from Burden to Shared Responsibility.

Commemorating and recognizing the International Day of Care and Support means moving beyond empty praise for the women in our lives that “do it all”. Women and Media Collective champions the global 5R framework for care: Recognise, Reduce, Redistribute, Respond and Represent.

We must invest in public care infrastructure, implement gender-responsive social policies, and actively dismantle patriarchal norms that confine women to the domain of unpaid care work. Care must be re-envisioned as a collective responsibility shared equally between the state, communities, men and women.