Unpaid and unequally distributed care responsibilities are a major reason women leave the workforce, the Deputy Minister of Women and Child Affairs told a regional gathering in Seoul, the Daily Mirror reported.
“When we ask why women leave the workforce, why families struggle to balance work and home, or why opportunities remain unequal, we often arrive at the same answer: care,” the Deputy Minister said.
The forum addressed transforming care systems for women’s economic empowerment. The Deputy Minister said the issue was particularly acute in Sri Lanka, where women continue to struggle to balance employment against childcare, care of elderly relatives, household duties and other unpaid work — labour she described as essential to families, workplaces and economies yet routinely ignored and undervalued.
“Every success story is also a care story,” she said, noting that behind every child who learns, every worker who contributes and every leader who serves there is usually someone providing care.
A plan drafted but not yet approved
The concrete policy disclosure in the speech is the state of Sri Lanka’s instruments.
The National Social Protection Strategy identifies social care as a priority, the Deputy Minister said, and a National Action Plan on Social Care has been developed and is awaiting Ministerial approval. The government’s stated long-term aim is to write care into national plans, programmes and budgets, reducing the burden on families while improving women’s access to employment.
She said attitudinal change was needed alongside greater investment in childcare, eldercare and services for persons with disabilities, and that care should be treated as a shared responsibility of families, communities, employers and the State rather than mainly a women’s obligation.
The regional track
Sri Lanka took part earlier this year in the SAARC Transform Care South Asia Dialogue in Nepal, organised by SAARC and UN Women with support from the Republic of Korea, which fed into a regional action plan on transforming care systems.
The Deputy Minister said countries in the region could learn from one another on childcare, eldercare, disability inclusion, public investment, data systems and social attitudes. “No country has all the answers,” she said, adding that Sri Lanka was ready to work with the Republic of Korea, UN Women and regional partners.
Context
The care economy has been a recurring theme in Sri Lankan policy discussion this year. The ILO convened a Colombo hub on unpaid care work under its South-4-Care programme — a separate event from the Seoul gathering — and the Prime Minister addressed the politics of the care economy at Sussex in May. A national social protection action plan developed with the ILO was reported in August.
An identification the report leaves open
The Daily Mirror does not name the Deputy Minister, referring to the office throughout while using “she” for the speaker. Earlier coverage of the ministry has recorded Namal Sudarshana as Deputy Minister of Women and Child Affairs, speaking on amendments to the National Child Protection Authority Act and on a ministry report into a child abandonment case in Wattegama. On the strength of this report alone the speaker in Seoul cannot be identified, and LankaNewz is not assuming the two are the same person.
Update: the missing number, and it is 6.2 million
This report originally noted that no figure was given for the scale of the problem — the statistic the whole argument turns on. Hiru News published one the same day.
Around 6.2 million Sri Lankan women do not hold jobs. Of those, 58.1% say they do not expect to work because of family responsibilities or household chores.
The age breakdown is the striking part. Among non-working women of working age, 87% of those aged 25 to 34, and 93.6% of those aged 35 to 54, give family responsibilities or household chores as the reason. In other words, for women in the years that would otherwise be the core of a working life, domestic responsibility is close to the only reason given.
The remainder of the 6.2 million is accounted for differently: 17.8% are not expecting to work because they are in higher education, and 16% because they are past retirement age. Those three categories together account for 91.9% of the total, leaving roughly 8% attributed to other reasons — a residual neither report breaks down.
UN Women is quoted making the distinction that matters for policy: that large numbers of these women are out of work not for lack of desire to work, but because so much of the day goes on cooking, cleaning, washing, childcare and the care of elderly and sick relatives. That is the same argument the Deputy Minister made in Seoul, now attached to a number.
A note on sourcing: Hiru attributes the figures to “a main national newspaper” reporting the same day rather than naming the outlet or the underlying survey, so the original statistical source is not identifiable from its account.
Not reported
The report does not name the Seoul event, its host or its dates, or say which other countries attended. It does not say when the National Action Plan on Social Care was completed, which Minister must approve it, how long it has been pending, or what it would cost, and no timeline is offered for writing care into the Budget.
On the figures, neither outlet gives Sri Lanka’s female labour force participation rate as a percentage, identifies the survey the 6.2 million comes from or the period it covers, or gives the comparable figure for men — without which the scale of the gap cannot be judged.
