Care Work and the Economy

Profile

Investigating the role of gender in social reproduction, labor markets, finance, and development — centered on the well-being of women and other under-represented groups.

Project Co-Directors (Co-PIs): Maria S. Floro & Elizabeth M. King

The Care Work and the Economy (CWE-GAM) project was a multidisciplinary research project housed in American University’s Department of Economics as part of the Program on Gender Analysis in Economics (PGAE).

Between 2017 and 2021, an international group of more than 40 multi-disciplinary researchers worked together to produce innovative research that incorporates the care economy and gender explicitly into policy tools to a) demonstrate the importance of understanding the nature and welfare implications of care work; b) promote public investment in care provisioning; and ultimately, c) reduce gender gaps in economic outcomes, advance gender equality and promote an inclusive and caring society.

CWE-GAM scholars were organized across three interconnected working groups:

1) Rethinking Macroeconomics brought care and gender into macroeconomic analysis;

2) Understanding and Measuring Care developed new approaches to measure care work and caregiver well-being as well as to estimate future caregiving needs based on demographic, labor force, and health trends;

3) Gender-Aware Macro-modelling for Policy Analyses produced country-specific tools to assess the economic, welfare, and distributional effects of policy.