The core premise of feminism is this: women can do anything. And yes, these days in developed economies, women without children earn about the same as men. The problem is not the opportunities available to them. It’s the opportunities that disappear as women become mothers.
This disconnect between paid work and care work is evident. In my research on work and motherhood, I have often found that organisations give little thought to the tensions that arise between women’s work and care identities.
A 2025 overview of how care is understood in feminist economic debates recognises the fundamental value of unpaid and underpaid care. But it doesn’t discuss how to reconcile paid work and care.
The unpaid work women do in the home alongside their paid work leads to reduced participation in the workforce, income inequality between the genders, time-poverty, and increased stress for women.
The challenges and constraints that women encounter in the workplace have long been recognised. But caring is also often viewed in a negative way – something that interrupts and stymies their participation in paid work. Motherhood is frequently framed as something that curtails ambition and income.
In contrast, paid work is valued because it generates financial resources. These perspectives speak to the outdated concept of the “ideal worker”, and the capitalist priorities of productivity and efficiency that underpin this idea.
Across academic research, financial resources are often seen as a means to buy exemption from some aspects of motherhood. Other research concedes that caring for older relatives can be rewarding, but then cites all the problems that caregivers may experience.
In short, it is almost impossible to find caring for children framed in a positive way. One paper positions care work as “responsibilities” and “obligations” that fall on women. But this framing is directly at odds with how the women I have spoken to understood their role as mothers: they talked fondly of their children, attended their needs and enjoyed spending time with them.
Rediscovering the value of care
The problem for both feminism and capitalism is that mothers must routinely combine paid work and caring responsibilities in order to make a living. This reflects the tensions that the research identifies but does not resolve: women are navigating systems that position care as a disruption rather than an important and valued form of work and identity.
Older women often recount their career success through a lens of sacrifice, while many younger parents resist long-hours cultures, experimenting with ways to share work and care. What this suggests is that there is a need for employers to have a more nuanced appreciation of parenting identities.
However, work structures often still rely on outdated breadwinner/caregiver identities – dictating how parents juggle paid work and care, and limiting the space for more flexible hybrid roles.
A model where the mother becomes the breadwinner and the father the caregiver is not ideal either. It may appear progressive, but in practice care work continues to be pressed to the margins and the financial precarity it leads to is not acknowledged or fixed. It is simply transferred to the male caregiver.
Breadwinner/caregiver norms are just not suited to society and family dynamics any more. But they can be dismantled and replaced by hybrid roles that allow people to combine work and care identities.
While the tensions of work and motherhood have not disappeared, other groups have emerged and are developing momentum. For example, fathers who understand and value their parenting role are prompting a groundswell of change.
In the UK, campaigns such as Parenting Out Loud, as well as demands for extended, government-funded paternity leave (for example, six weeks of leave paid at 90% of income), seek to enable fathers to care and bond with their children without worrying about work pressures. These movements imagine a future where care is equally valued and recognised for its importance to society.
Governments, employers and trade unions have an opportunity to create work cultures that enable parents to do their jobs well at the same time as caring. Structures that value both work and care will allow everyone to contribute to the economy while actively participating in their caregiving roles.
Acknowledging an employee’s care identity needs to extend far beyond workplaces begrudgingly accommodating a mother working from home to care for a sick toddler. It involves enabling and trusting parents to respond to routine parenting challenges in an appropriate way – without penalty or judgment. For example, a dad being able to take emergency leave to respond to his child’s sickness, or a mum arriving late to work after supporting a teenager who is stressed by exams.
Funded, high-quality and reliable care infrastructure is essential, alongside flexible working. The persistent motherhood wage penalty is a good barometer to see how things are changing: interventions that normalise combining work and care will narrow this pay gap, and give a clear indication of what works.
Caroline Millar received PhD funding from Department for the Economy (NI).
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
