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Gender and Care Work

PERI's program on Gender and Care Work aims to develop a unified picture of the "care sector" of the economy with attention to the changing roles of the family, the market, and the state.

Program Co-Directors

Nancy Folbre

Program on Gender and Care Work; Professor Emerita of Economics

Nancy Folbre

Katherine Moos

Economist, Program on Gender and Care Work; Assistant Professor of Economics

Katherine Moos

Folbre Named Principal Investigator on $2.7 Million Grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Nancy Folbre, professor emerita of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at UMass Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute, has been named principal investigator on a $2.7 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to improve U.S. data infrastructure related to both paid and unpaid care provision.

The grant will support two projects, one exploring possible improvements in national statistical surveys on care provision and another enhancing a website currently under construction to present data on the care economy in a user-friendly format that will encourage public engagement. Read the Full Press Release

Care Talk Blog: Revaluing care in the global economy.

This blog was founded by Nancy Folbre to engage researchers, students, journalists, and others interested in the “care sector”– an important part of our economy devoted to the direct care of others through the family, the community, the market, and the state. In collaboration with Jocelyn Olcott and the Revaluing Care in the Global Economy network, the blog now features posts by researchers working in the quantitative and qualitative social sciences as well as the humanities to explore the problems of 1) how to measure economic contributions made by families and communities; 2) the shortcomings of the standard “business model” based on profit maximization and consumer choice as a means of delivering effective care services through the market; 3) poor institutional design in the U.S. public sector, which often fails to deliver equitable, efficient, or politically sustainable systems of care provision; and 4) the analysis of alternative models for ensuring equitable access to and valuation of both paid and unpaid care.

Read the Care Talk blog

The Economics of Care

In this interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Nancy Folbre outlines “care,” a vast category that crosses the boundaries between the economic and the noneconomic, the public and the private. Some 26 million people provide unpaid health care services in households. Commercial care is increasing, in part because of the aging of the population and the increased participation of women in the labor market. Children, the sick and the elderly still need to be looked after, and there are fewer people at home to look after them. Conditions of work in the care industries are poor, with low pay and little training; fewer than half of all child-care workers receive full health insurance, for themselves or their own children. The quality of care is also often poor; some 40 percent of nursing homes repeatedly fail health and safety inspections. But care is significantly undervalued, particularly in an economic sense, Folbre argues, in both the household and in the labor market.

Gender and Care Work Research and Commentary