Book

Description

Care work sustains economies and societies, yet it remains systematically undervalued, underfunded, and disproportionately carried out by women. Reimagining and Investing in Care makes the case for a fundamental rethinking of care as a core form of social and economic infrastructure. Drawing on extensive EU-level research, comparative country analysis, and the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, this book exposes how unpaid and low-paid care work underpins economic growth while reinforcing gender inequality. The gendered nature of paid and unpaid care across childcare, healthcare, education, and long-term care, reveals deep structural weaknesses in current care systems, highlighting a global care crisis that demonstrates how care is increasingly reliant on migrant women. They show how existing economic models fail to count or value care, rendering much of women’s work invisible, and how this invisibility shapes labour markets, social protection, migration, and poverty. The pandemic did not create a care crisis but laid bare and exacerbated one that has been decades in the making. This analysis demonstrates how care has been marginalised by the EU despite its proven economic and social returns. It advances a clear, evidence-based strategy for placing care at the centre of EU economic policy, calling for care to be recognised as a social investment and for gender equality to be embedded in budgeting, data collection, and policy design. Combining feminist economic analysis with concrete policy recommendations, Reimagining and Investing in Care offers a compelling roadmap for building more resilient, equal, and just societies - by finally recognising care as the foundation on which all societies depend.