“There is no time for rest”: Gendered CSR, sustainable development and the unpaid care work governance gap

Abstract

Unpaid care work, including child care, elder care, and housework, is unremunerated work essential to human survival and flourishing. Worldwide, women disproportionally carry out this work, impacting upon their ability to engage in other activities, such as education, employment, or leisure. Despite a growing number of businesses engaging in “gendered CSR,” in the form of women's empowerment projects, attention to unpaid care work remains little discussed in the literature, despite its importance to sustainable development. Applying Diane Elson's feminist economic framework for alleviating unpaid care work inequality to a case study of gendered CSR in Ghana, I find that at present unpaid care work is (a) unrecognised in business’ CSR, (b) may be both reduced or exacerbated by CSR efforts, and (c) remains conceptualised as relevant only to the private sphere, therefore, missing a unique opportunity for business to contribute to gender equality and sustainable development. Connecting unpaid care work and business responsibility contributes to a more expansive understanding of what CSR may be.

Disrupting the Gender Institution: Consciousness-Raising in the Cocoa Value Chain

“…Cooking can take many hours, requiring trips to wells and markets. Our visual data revealed that many women spent most of their time cooking, to the detriment of other daily activities (McCarthy, forthcoming). Farmer focus groups sometimes used cooking and childcare tasks to emphasize that men and women were ‘not the same’ (AD1) in nature: ‘Some of the women, when you give them money their status changes, they want to become the boss in the house.…”

“…These involved the generation of visual data in the form of drawn diagrams (McCarthy & Muthuri, 2018) and focus group discussions (FGDs). They were attended by between 6 and 20 cocoa farmers (n = 152), exploring their roles in cocoa production, income streams, decision-making ability and domestic workloads (McCarthy, forthcoming; McCarthy & Muthuri, 2018). Men’s and women’s sub-FGDs allowed participants to explore their experiences with people of their own sex, before sharing thoughts in plenary.…”

The hegemony of men in global value chains: Why it matters for labour governance

“…Bargaining connotes a repositioning of power, however small. In the cocoa value chain, some women used training and inclusion to call out inequities between men and women, particularly related to unfair sharing of unpaid labour (McCarthy, 2018). Women organised and vocalised against malpractice within Bangladeshi textile factories through trade unions (Alamgir and Alakavuklar, 2020), co-opted a 'business-case' for better treatment in Mexico (Plankey-Videla, 2012) and resisted gender expectations through 'hysteric' behaviours in Malaysia (Ong, 2010).…”

Imagining new feminist futures: How feminist social movements contest the neoliberalization of feminism in an increasingly corporate‐dominated world

“…Concurrently, a growing number of studies have both praised (Karam & Jamali, ; McCarthy & Muthuri, ) and venerated (Pearson, ; Roberts, ) approaches to gender equality led by corporations through CSR. Praise herein tends to focus on ways in which CSR initiatives can help individual women in economic terms (Dolan & Scott, ), although even these claims are increasingly contested in the literature regarding the experiences of the women ‘beneficiaries’ of such initiatives (McCarthy, , forthcoming; Tornhill, , ).…”