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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe regional average captures this inequality: care workers earn less than the legally established minimum wage, while the rest of the working population earns well above it. This is not merely a matter of differences in pay. Paid caregivers often work part-time and face a lack of employment contracts, social protection, and training opportunities (IDB, 2025).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To understand the roots of this precariousness, it is necessary to remember that much of care work is not even paid. Although they are not the same, unpaid and paid care are part of the same system, and the limited recognition of the former largely explains the devaluation of the latter. An activity historically regarded as a \u201cnatural\u201d responsibility of women can easily become a poorly paid job when it enters the labor market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cooking, cleaning, accompanying an older person, helping them get dressed, or arranging a medical appointment are essential activities for the functioning of households and the economy as a whole. Yet when performed within the family, they tend to be excluded from labor accounts and fall disproportionately on women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This work functions as an enormous invisible subsidy. In Latin America and the Caribbean, unpaid domestic and care work accounts for approximately 21% of gross domestic product (GDP), with women generating nearly three-quarters of that value, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). In other words, households\u2014and women in particular\u2014absorb costs free of charge that would otherwise have to be borne by the state, the market, or families through paid services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The term \u201cgender subsidy\u201d is particularly apt because this unpaid work enables other people to study, hold paid jobs, and participate in the economy. It also reduces demand for public and private services. But those who provide this time pay a price: fewer employment opportunities, lower incomes, greater difficulty accessing social security, and increased exposure to poverty in old age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In turn, when care is provided for pay, precarious working conditions are not distributed at random either. The paid care workforce consists predominantly of middle-aged women. Furthermore, the sector is deeply affected by racial and ethnic inequality: more than half of care workers are of African descent, and around 3% belong to Indigenous peoples. Migrant women and women from low-income backgrounds are also overrepresented. Those who face the greatest barriers in the labor market end up taking on the least protected and lowest-paid jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n