Problem Statement

To talk about care is to consider the activities that regenerate daily and generationally the physical and emotional well-being of people. A few years ago, the unequal distribution of care tasks began to be recognized as one of the main factors of gender inequality. Historically, caring for people within the family nucleus has fallen mainly on women, limiting their possibilities of spending that time obtaining formal employment and promoting their economic autonomy, taking care of their health or enjoying leisure. Likewise, when women participate in working life, care within the family nucleus is not distributed equitably, so women who work do so by supporting the double shift that formal work implies, and the work of the home care. This concept is called sexual division of labor.

Another factor that plays an important role in the distribution of care work is its invisibility. Given that the care work carried out within the family nucleus is carried out without remuneration, it is difficult to measure the amount of work it represents. Being able to understand the size of the population that requires care, and the type of care they require will help understand the demand for care that a city has. Likewise, investigating the offer of professionalized care, both public programs and private services, will help quantify the cost of the care work carried out, and the time and professional preparation required to carry it out.

The purpose of this project is to recognize the importance of care in economic development and to be able to measure it. Understanding it will help create new jobs, contribute to the justice and autonomy of women, and provide a framework of understanding about the rights, time and resources required to care for and serve the people who need it most. Our vision for the future is that when implementing a project like this, a comprehensive vision of the role of care is incorporated in the design of public programs, that the annual budgets allocated to health, education and public spaces incorporate the dimension of care within its design, and that the different elements that make up the care economy begin to appear within the economic measurements of cities, provinces and countries.

The way in which this project seeks to achieve this goal is by guiding decision makers in the collection of data that serve to dimension the care economy on different fronts: the profile of the different populations that require care, and the caregivers, the supply and demand of services, programs and infrastructure for care in both the public and private sectors and community networks. The guide seeks to focus on open data, so that the exercise can be shared publicly, and all sectors of society can be involved in the quest to take city activities seriously as an important economic sector of human activity.