What does it mean to measure unpaid care work in ways that truly reflect women’s lives? Sofía shares her reflections after conducting 60 interviews with caregivers in Chile.
When I began interviewing women caregivers in coastal Chile for my research on the care economy, I thought I was prepared for what I would find: long workdays, multitasking, exhaustion. But what struck me wasn’t the quantity of work — it was the elasticity of time itself.
Women would start their day at five in the morning, cooking or preparing uniforms, and finish close to midnight. Yet when I asked how many hours they spent “working,” many replied, “It depends.” That phrase — it depends — became the most important data point of all.
Time-use surveys, like the ones governments rely on to design policies, are built around predictable, measurable segments: hours, minutes, tasks. But unpaid care work refuses to fit into those neat boxes. Care stretches, overlaps, interrupts. It happens in-between everything else. It’s the child you feed while answering messages, the elder you check on while hanging the laundry.
One woman told me, “I’m never not working; I just change who I’m working for.” That sentence has followed me ever since.
As feminist researchers, we need methods that can hold the messy, emotional, and continuous nature of care. That means qualitative storytelling alongside quantitative measurement; participatory diaries alongside national statistics. The question isn’t just how much time women spend caring — it’s what kind of time it is, and how it shapes their dignity, rest, and sense of self.
Unpaid labor may be invisible to markets, but it is the infrastructure of every economy. Counting it is political — but understanding it requires listening.