Gender and Care: A Conceptual Approach to Care Mobility

The concept of care refers to the work performed by adult individuals for children, the elderly, people with illnesses or disabilities, and, in general, for the functioning of the home, community, or environment. This work can be paid, but mostly it is unpaid and has a significant feminization component, where historically it has not been considered as productive work; however, its importance lies in sustaining the workforce and has been invisibilized in society's economy.

The care economy is defined as the work performed and value created, primarily in the domestic sphere. Under this logic, and in order to consider its contribution to the national economy, Law 1413 of 2010 was enacted, which determines the need to include "the care economy in the national accounts system in order to measure women's contribution to the country's economic and social development and as a fundamental tool for the definition and implementation of public policies." The law defines the care economy as: "unpaid work carried out in the home, related to the maintenance of the household, care for other household or community members, and the maintenance of the paid workforce. This category of work is of fundamental economic importance in society." It also acknowledges that many individuals participate in the labor market with precarious conditions, leading to conflicts in managing care-related responsibilities.

Focused on unpaid domestic and care work, the law considers activities such as: Organization, distribution, and supervision of household tasks; food preparation; cleaning and maintenance of the home and belongings; laundry; childcare, education, and assistance with school tasks; care for the elderly and sick; shopping, payments, or household-related errands.; home repairs and community services and unpaid assistance to relatives, friends, and neighbors.

Similarly, globally, the burdens and gaps generated by the care economy are beginning to be recognized. In 2015, all United Nations member states signed the 2030 Agenda, where Goal 5 aims to "achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls."

Recognizing the achievement of this goal requires different actions and perspectives, leading to the establishment of 9 targets, where the fourth target states: "Recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure, and social protection policies, and promote shared responsibility within the household and the family, as appropriate in each country." Thus, unpaid domestic and care work is identified as a facet of gender equity issues, acknowledging the need to generate strategies to recognize, redistribute, and professionalize care-related work.

Mobility and Gender: A Reflection from an Interdisciplinary Perspective

Mobility and gender are two categories that reveal social inequalities and invisibilities in mobility. However, when intersected, they show that mobility not only expresses inequality but also reproduces gender inequalities. This reflection becomes possible when analyzed from an interdisciplinary perspective that acknowledges the need to look beyond disciplinary boundaries. It is crucial for mobility studies and policymaking to incorporate a gender perspective because the invisibility of women has led to transportation planning that does not meet women's needs.

Gender and mobility constitute a dichotomy that has been underexplored in public policies, as they tend to focus on the dominant subject, in this case, men. However, mobility is a complex practice that, as a social phenomenon, allows us to understand not only physical movement and how it is regulated and conditioned through networks and infrastructures but also generates experiences and emotions. Moreover, mobility, as a constituent element of the city, contributes to reproducing inequalities, particularly gender inequalities.

Care Mobility: An Umbrella Concept

There is a type of mobility that is least studied, as very few cities contemplate conducting mobility surveys (which homogenize and view women as a homogeneous group) considering this umbrella concept to quantify and visualize the movements made by predominantly women for caregiving purposes and household care: care mobility. The concept of 'care mobility' was introduced by Inés Sánchez de Madariaga in 2009, identifying the need to differentially understand daily trips related to caregiving activities. This need arises from how mobility is planned in different cities, focusing on trips with origins and destinations related to work or study and residence. Therefore, movements associated with the care economy are often overlooked, assuming linear trips within predefined routes attributed to caregivers, who are predominantly women within the family.

From a gender perspective, analyzing modern urban planning and applying the concept of 'care' invites us to consider men's and women's lives. The concept encompasses all activities necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of life, which are generally unpaid, unequally distributed, and attributed to gender roles and norms (sexual division of labor), widening the gender gap as women continue to assume double and triple burdens of work, including caregiving tasks. These realities intersect with other factors such as age, race, among others, which can exacerbate discrimination.

It is here that transportation must ensure a minimum level of safety, comfort, and affordability, taking into account caregiving, household maintenance, and caregiving for individuals. Following transportation, city planning should review how to configure the necessary infrastructure and services for daily life (childcare, elderly care). Moreover, developing policies that improve mobility, with a gender and care perspective, has a direct impact on the entire population. Supporting public transportation systems, non-polluting modes of transportation, and transportation systems that enable women to engage in employment and household activities is crucial because caregiving tasks continue to be assigned to women and have not been adequately redistributed between men and women, despite policies developed in recent years.

Why Discuss Gender in the Context of Care Mobility?

When discussing the economy and care mobility, direct reference is made to caregiving roles, which, as shown in previous sections, have a differential cultural burden depending on whether they are performed by men or women. For example, in 2017, 89.4% of caregivers for people with disabilities requiring permanent assistance in their daily activities were women.

Other variables besides the gender of individuals must be considered to assess the depth of these inequities. While for individuals with higher education, the distribution of burdens is approximately for every hour men dedicate to unpaid care work, women dedicate 3 hours. For those without any educational level, the ratio is 1 hour for every 5 hours assigned to women. Another associated characteristic revealing the unequal burdens associated with caregiving roles is age: for those under 18, women perform 3 hours of unpaid care work for every 2 hours performed by men, while among those aged 18 to 44, women perform 3 hours for every 1 hour of men, and for those over 45, women perform 4 hours for every 1 hour of men.

In this way, among many others, the disparity in the burdens associated with caregiving roles for those who reproduce feminine versus masculine roles is evident, where the responsibility for caregiving disproportionately falls on women. Therefore, analyzing the impacts due to time devoted to caregiving cannot overlook the unequal burden borne by women.

Furthermore, understanding and visualizing care mobility have the potential to reduce gaps, as the omission of care mobility can lead to an increase in the inequality gaps generated by caregiving-related burdens. To develop caregiving trips and considering that mobility often disregards actors associated with caregiving, individuals make adaptations to their trips to meet their relevant parameters, often resulting in increased road risks, which opens up an analysis perspective of road safety, gender, and care mobility.

Finally, the possibility of having or not having access to the city, of guaranteeing the right to the city, lies in the capacity of those who plan mobility and urbanism to include the gender perspective and recognize care mobility. Care, therefore, becomes a motivator for trips. When these two categories are not taken into account as analytical categories for transportation and mobility planning, they limit people's ability to move and enjoy their surroundings, while also increasing the burdens already associated with the care economy.

References:

Gasper, Des. (2012) Interdisciplinarity Towards a complex ecology of ideas. Ambiente y sostenibilidad, 2, 3-34.

Pineda Javier (2024). El giro conceptual y la ética del cuidado. La Sociedad del Cuidado y Políticas de la Vida. CLACSO (in print).

Pineda, Javier (2011). La carga del trabajo de cuidado: distribución social y negociación familiar. En El trabajo y la ética del cuidado  (pp. 35-75), Luz Gabriela Arango; Pascale Molinier (Eds.). Medellín: La Carreta/Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Congreso de Colombia (2010). Ley 1413 del 11 de noviembre de 2010, Por medio de la cual se regula la inclusión de la economía del cuidado en el sistema de cuentas nacionales con el objeto de medir la contribución de la mujer al desarrollo económico y social del país y como herramienta fundamental para la definición e implementación de políticas públicas. https://www.dane.gov.co/files/acerca/Normatividad/Ley1413_2010.pdf

United Nations. (n.d.). Igualdad de Género y Empoderamiento de la Mujer. Recuperado el 12 de febrero de 2024, de Objetivo 5: Lograr la igualdad entre los géneros y empoderar a todas las mujeres y las niñas: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/gender-equality/

UN Women - Latin America and the Caribbean. (n.d.). Reconocer, redistribuir y profesionalizar el trabajo de Cuidado. https://lac.unwomen.org/en/news-and-events/articles/2019/3/recognize-redistribute-and-professionalize-care-work

Sánchez de Madariaga, I., & Zucchini, E. (2020). "Movilidad del cuidado" en Madrid: nuevos criterios para las políticas de transporte. Ciudad y territorio, 89-102.

Secretaría Distrital de la Mujer. (13 de enero de 2020). Más mujeres en el sector del transporte = más equidad y mejor percepción de seguridad. https://omeg.sdmujer.gov.co/

Secretaría Distrital de la Mujer. (2019). Experiencias de las mujeres en el espacio y transporte público. Bogotá́: Boletín informativo de la Secretaría Distrital de la Mujer.

Secretaría Distrital de la Mujer. (2018). Valoración del trabajo doméstico y de cuidado no remunerado 2017. Obtenido de https://omeg.sdmujer.gov.co/

Exploring gender, space and urban planning: insights from Virginia Woolf and Gloria Anzaldúa

In October 1928, Virginia Woolf (London, 1882 – Lewes, 1941) delivered a series of lectures at the University of Cambridge, which she compiled into 'A Room of One's Own', a collection of essays published for the first time a year later. It discussed economic autonomy, but also social autonomy, particularly for women, especially women writers. She herself was considered one of the most important modernist authors of the 20th century and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. In this essay, I seek to relate the metaphor of "a room of one's own" in the context of the "own" city, with the purpose of shaping a reflection on gender studies applied to space as territory for women. Likewise, and with great difficulty, I associate some ideas of the Chicane writer and activist, Gloria Anzaldúa, that may be related to urban planning and the right to the city.

 

To start this reflection, it is worth mentioning that perhaps the brief excerpt from Woolf's book that best captures the main idea of the book, "[...] She told you how she had come to the prosaic conclusion that one must have 500 pounds a year and a room with a lock on the door in order to write novels or poems [...]", (Woolf, p. 99) and which she repeats a few more times, comes to remind us that women have not had it easy neither in the private space nor in the public space, nor in the world of literature, nor in any other shore or field of life, much less in a broader territory such as the city, just because they are women. As long as there is no equality between men and women, and we do not have the same economic possibilities as well as realization-in-the-world, there will not only be a single struggle to give and we will not have access to a room of our own, to a city of our own.

 

The metaphor of the own room motivates me to expand it and to think about those spaces that are also for women, for women. Inevitably, because of my work on city issues related to transportation planning, and because of my life experience, as a passenger, urban cyclist, cycle-traveller, and flâneuse [1], I compare the city, on a larger scale, to the own room, but smaller in relation to the dimension of the world. But I also see it as a space that is forbidden to us at certain times, especially at night; that violates us, especially when we experience street sexual harassment and other types of gender-based violence, of which we are also subject-objects by virtue of being women; that limits us because it puts us in dispute over the marking of our bodies in a territory dominated by one gender, the male, and which deepens from intersectionality. On this, Anzaldúa (p. 288) mentions that gender is also an important issue and highlights the dispute over how white culture, for example, emphasizes that we are all equal, men and women, and it is an idea that has also been central in city planning, assuming that it is planned under a "neutral" idea of city experiences for all people.

 

Anzaldúa, in "Borderlands, La Frontera", develops the concept of "mestiza consciousness", which can have significant implications for urban planning studies, especially regarding the conception and design of inclusive and culturally sensitive urban spaces. Recognizing diversity, understood as the diversity of gender identities and expressions, can inspire urban planners to consider the needs of people of diverse gender identities when designing urban spaces, ensuring they are inclusive and accessible.

 

From the awareness of borders and limits, those who plan a city can adopt a perspective that recognizes and celebrates cultural and social diversity in cities, fostering integration instead of segregation. Additionally, through the promotion of authenticity and identity, Anzaldúa emphasizes the importance of living authentically according to one's own identity. This can be translated into urban planning by creating spaces that allow people to express themselves and connect with their cultural and gender identities, whether through public art, the preservation of historic neighbourhoods, or the design of inclusive community spaces. And, in relation to challenging heteronormative norms, Anzaldúa questions heteronormative gender norms and promotes the freedom to define one's own gender. In the urban context, this could involve creating policies and programs that support LGBTQ+ people and including their needs in housing, transportation, and public service planning.

 

Furthermore, gender oppression, Anzaldúa adds "[...] (that is, male exploitation and control of women's productive and reproductive energies on the deceptive basis of a biological difference) originated in the first division of labour, namely. between women and men" (p. 173), in relation to urban planning, focuses attention on trips whose origins and destinations are for work or study and residence and ignores other movements that are associated, for example, with care and which are attributed, to a large extent, to women.

 

Women's bodies are often the first territory in dispute, and bodily integrity and the right to the city are jeopardized by violence. The "space of power" contaminates, especially because it distorts our own "space", as we see in Virginia Woolf's book. The power dynamics within a space can have a contaminating or distorting effect on our personal space. It can shape social interactions, hierarchies, and the distribution of resources within a given space.

 

The right to the city for women, according to the manifesto stated on the last 8M for a global mobilization, points out that "speaking of the Right of Women to the City is a matter of social justice, a change in cultural paradigm, to understand not only the complexity of cities but also of identities, the people for whom we are advocating the Right to the City" (Global Platform for the Right to the city).

 

Woolf, through the metaphor of a room of one's own, also portrays the limitations or restrictions that women have in relation to controlling space and a certain privatization of women to social life, to the right to the city:

 

"I dallied a moment, couldn't help myself, with the idea of what would have happened if Charlotte Brontë had had, let's say, three hundred pounds a year [...], if she had had more knowledge of the active world, and of cities, and of regions full of life, more practical experience, if she had had contact with people of her kind and dealt with a variety of characters. [...] She knew better than anyone how much her genius would have benefited if it had not been wasted on solitary contemplations of distant fields; if she had been given the experience, the contact with the world and the travels. But they were not given to her, they were denied to her [...]" (Woolf, p. 68 and 69).

 

What the British author does is to examine how women's access to the public space, to the world, has historically been limited for them. So, she criticizes the exclusion of women from these spaces and highlights how it has affected women's ability to participate in the intellectual and creative culture of society. The city, for Woolf, is the space of opportunities and diversity, the space of experiences and also of perspectives, but it can also be hostile to women who struggle to find a place in it. It could also be said that, for the main character of the book, any contact with the outside.

[1] Neologism coined by Lauren Elkin in her book 'Flâneuse' to refer to the feminine form of 'flâneur' (stroller, in English), a noun from French, whose feminine form refers to a woman who is observant, urban, idle, and adrift.

References:

Anzaldúa, Gloria (2012). Borderlands La Frontera. The new mestiza. Claremont School of Theology.

Anzaldúa, Gloria (2015). This bridge called my black. Suny Press.

Bassam, Nourhan (2023). The Gendered City. How cities keep failing Women. (self-published)

Elkin, Lauren (2017). Flâneuse. Malpaso.

Kern, Leslie (2019). Feminist city. A field guide. Oh! Books Literary agency

¡Por el Derecho a la Ciudad de las mujeres! Global Plathform for the Right to the city (2023). Recuperado el 17 de marzo de https://www.right2city.org/es/news/por-el-derecho-a-la-ciudad-de-las-mujeres/

Woolf, Virginia. (2008). Una habitación propia. Seix Barral (cap. 1, 2).