“We were all working mothers,” writes American journalist Megan Stack in her recent New Yorker piece about raising two children in India. The women who helped shape her thinking and cleared the way for her writing were migrants who left their own children behind to lovingly care for hers. “We spun webs of compromise and sacrifice and cash, and it all revolved around me—my work, my money, my imagined utopias of one-on-one fair trade that were never quite achieved,” she writes.   

Stack’s candor is as refreshing as her insight into the complexities of today’s gender-riven global economy, which propel low-income women to leave their own loved ones in order to take caregiving jobs offered by women in more prosperous families. Both groups of women are exercising their right to work—and fulfilling their responsibility to care for their families—but in very different ways.

International advocates for women recognize that paid employment is key to both gender equality and the economic health of all societies, yet worldwide, a gender gap persists. In 2018, men were far more likely to have full-time paid work (94 percent vs. 63 percent) and they earned 23 percent more than women. The reasons for this are well-known: women continue to bear the bulk of responsibility for domestic and caring duties, whether working for wages or not, but they seldom hold the most lucrative and dependable jobs. And while mothers of children under 5 were almost as likely to be employed as women with no children (45.8 percent vs. 53.2 percent), women with children pay a “mommy penalty.” This can take the form of wages that are not just significantly lower than men’s but also 6 percent lower than non-mothers’, the inability to take full-time work, or exclusion from certain occupations altogether.

Care Deficits

Job opportunities for women vary widely between and within countries, but in much of the developing world, women’s “access to productive and financial resources,” including good jobs, remains particularly low, owing in part to an absence of or poorly enforced anti-discrimination laws. The lack of economic opportunity in these regions prompts many women to migrate in search of better-paying employment, inevitably leaving “care deficits” in their wake. Migrant women workers have been accused of abandoning their children. In the EU, they have even been called out for creating “Euro-orphans.”

Men, of course, have been migrating for years with impunity. Instead, they win praise for making sacrifices to support their families. But women, whether mothers or not, are the designated family caretakers and therefore are blamed if they leave. Their right to migrate is, in effect, questioned.

In response, feminist analysts and policymakers point to women’s economic constraints as well as the cultural and social roots of their family obligations. If care work were equally shared while women were still at home, feminists say, their departure might be less disruptive. As it is, many men fail to step up even after the women have gone, leaving it to other female relatives—usually matrilineal—to take over.

Caregiving from Afar

Even working abroad as caregivers, women are not excused from family duties. Now facing the challenges of being migrants, their usual double burden becomes a triple one. Not only are they expected to send remittances (which they do, more reliably and at a higher share of their wages than men, though usually paid less), many also remain fully involved in day-to-day relationships back home. They recruit and oversee replacement caregivers, family or non-family, paid or unpaid; interact with teachers, health care providers and other professionals; and resolve disputes, especially between children and substitute caregivers as they unfold.

With cellphones and Skype, caring across borders as “transnational mothers” is now much easier, faster, and cheaper than it was when migrants had to rely on mail and telephone, but it is also time-consuming and can be highly stressful. To ease the tension, where possible (especially within the EU), two women—sisters, or a mother and daughter—may arrange to share both a job and family duties, circulating between home and worksite every few months, thereby providing continuity at both ends.

The women in wealthy countries who hire caregivers also face criticism, not just for exercising their right to take paid work rather than stay home (often not a choice but a necessity), but for “foisting their duties” on lower-paid, less-educated, and generally less fortunate women, many of them migrants. To be sure, it is difficult if not impossible to eradicate the imbalances between employers and employees in such situations, but female employers are being singled out for decisions that may have been made by a couple or an entire family, and that allow men as well as women to keep paid employment.

The governments of wealthy nations must also share the blame. The growing reliance on low-paid migrant caregivers is at least partly due to recent declines in social provision (or failure to develop welfare states in the first place). Countries with strong welfare states, such as Denmark, Sweden and France, depend far less on migrants to perform child or elder care, having professionalized these occupations and made them well-paying and attractive to native-born workers.

To begin to remedy the imbalance in caring resources, all nations must ensure that care work is “decent work,” that their labor and immigration laws fully cover caregivers, and that employers underwrite health insurance and other benefits such as paid vacations and retirement. Employers should also be required to provide live-in migrant employees with internet, time, and privacy so that they can handle their personal affairs. And beneficiary societies could help sending countries by offering their governments subsidies to create social services for families with absent caregivers.

Long-term, wealthy nations might consider developing a new Marshall-style plan to bring the global economy into greater balance. This would allow women as well as men to find decent, well-paid jobs at home, thereby enabling all to exercise their right to work while remaining near their families (or to migrate—but only if they wish). With families kept together, women and men may find it easier to negotiate sharing responsibilities for care, thereby moving closer to gender equality.