Women’s economic rights

What are economic rights?

Economic rights include the right to decent work, to equal pay and to land and adequate housing.5  These are rights that women living in poverty are often denied. 

Women who are also discriminated against due to other aspects of their identity - such as their age, religion or ethnicity - face even greater barriers to the fulfilment of their economic rights. 

The impact of unpaid care and domestic work

Globally, women take on three times as much unpaid care work as men.6  This includes caring for children, the sick and the elderly, taking care of household tasks such as cooking, collecting water and subsistence farming.

The poorest women in the world face the largest burden of unpaid work, because of the lack of public services and infrastructure - like healthcare and clean water - to support them. 

More women are getting paid jobs, but the amount of unpaid care work that they face at home is not being reduced at the same rate. This leaves many women facing a ‘double burden’ of work inside and outside the home. When paid and unpaid work hours are combined, women currently work longer days than men in nearly all countries.7

A young woman entering the job market today can expect to work four years more than her male counterparts over her lifetime, due to balancing paid work and unpaid care responsibilities.8

The time and energy spent on care work may not leave enough time in a day for decent paid work, for studying, for taking part in women's rights organisations, or for rest and leisure. This means that unpaid care responsibilities also narrow women’s choices in the type of job they get, often forcing them into informal, part-time or low-paid employment. This is often reinforced by social norms and perceptions around the role that women 'should' play in the family and in wider society. 

As a result, many women are financially dependent on male partners or family members. This can limit the choices that a women has, including her ability to leave a violent partner. 

Women’s lives are affected by the burden of unpaid care work at every age. Older women work for longer and girls are pulled out of school to do household chores, denying them their right to education.

Women face low pay and conditions at work

Women are more likely than men to have a job in sectors where pay and conditions are the lowest. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that in 2012 more than half of all employed women worldwide were in informal employment.9

Many women have no basic protection or rights at work, because their jobs are not covered by labour law. This means that they will not receive sick pay, maternity pay and cannot join a union, exposing them to high rates of human rights abuses, including sexual violence. Even when labour laws are in place, women employed in both the formal and informal sectors are at a high risk of exploitation because these laws are often limited and not implemented.

Women from developing countries are among the most vulnerable to exploitation in global supply chains. Approximately 80% of the world’s garment workers are women.10  They often work in dangerous environments. In April 2013, the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed killing over 1,100 people, most of whom were young women from low income families. This was a stark reminder of the shocking conditions that women continue to face in the supply chains of international corporations, and the lack of recourse to justice.

Women’s rights organisations and movements play a critical role in protecting and advancing the rights of workers. ActionAid has been supporting workers' rights groups in several countries to campaign for fairer pay and safer, more humane, working conditions.

The gender pay gap

When women are paid for a job, they earn on average between 10% to 30% less than men for work of equal value.11

The ILO estimates that at the current rate of progress it will take 75 years to make the principle of ‘equal pay for equal work’ a reality for women and men.12  Women’s unpaid care work contributes to the overall gender pay gap, as this effectively means that women are subsiding the economy with free and often invisible work.