WHEN THE STATE STEPS BACK,WOMEN STEP IN — AND NO ONE PAYS THEM

Part 4 of the “Who Is This Crisis For?” Series — SocDem Asia Pacific

Sondang Tarida Tampubolon is the Coordinator of Social Democrats Asia Pacific (SocDem Asia Pacific) and Deputy Secretary-General of the National Democratic Party (Partai NasDem), Indonesia.

This article is part of the SocDem Asia Pacific editorial series leading up to the webinar “Regional Solidarity in Times of Crisis” in August 2026.

Introduction

Across Asia and the Pacific, governments tell a familiar story about social progress. It is a story of rising GDP, expanding middle classes, and improving human development indicators. Life expectancy has climbed, gender gaps in education have narrowed, and social assistance programmes have lifted millions out of extreme poverty.[3][4]

But this story is incomplete. It omits the mechanism that quietly made much of this progress possible: women’s unpaid labour. Every time the state has retreated from its responsibilities — underfunding hospitals, pricing out childcare, abandoning elder care — women have stepped in. Without recognition, without pay, without protection.[5][3]

When public hospitals are underfunded, women provide post-operative care at home. When childcare is unaffordable or unavailable, women leave the workforce to raise children. When older relatives cannot live independently, women reorganise their entire lives around caregiving. When schools close or community services are cut, women absorb the shock.[3][5]

This is not a natural arrangement. It is a political one — the result of deliberate policy choices that shift the costs of care from public budgets onto women’s time, bodies, and futures.[6][7]

How the State Stepped Back

The current architecture of social policy in Asia Pacific was not an accident. It was built over decades of deliberate choices.

In the 1980s and 1990s, structural adjustment and market liberalisation reshaped economies across the region. Under pressure from international financial institutions, many governments slashed public spending on social services, introduced user fees for health and education, privatised public enterprises, and dismantled labour protections in the name of “flexibility.”[8][9]

The explicit logic was efficiency. The unstated assumption was that whatever the market did not provide, families would — and in practice, “families” meant women. This assumption was embedded into policy design: in the absence of public childcare; in pension systems built around continuous, formal, full-time employment; in health systems that quietly presumed the permanent presence of a family caregiver at home.[9][6]

The 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis made this pattern starkly visible, even if it remained unacknowledged by policymakers. As formal jobs disappeared and incomes collapsed, women intensified their unpaid care work and informal economic activity, acting as shock absorbers for entire communities. The eventual recovery was celebrated in macroeconomic terms; the women whose unpaid labour underpinned it were barely mentioned.[9]

COVID-19 repeated the pattern on a far larger scale. Time-use data and rapid assessments across Asia Pacific documented sharp, sustained increases in women’s unpaid care and domestic work as schools shuttered and health systems buckled under strain. Those increases have not fully reversed, even as economies have reopened.[10][6]

With slower growth projected for the coming years, the conditions for another cycle of state retreat and female absorption are firmly in place. The only question is whether this time we are willing to name the pattern — and finally change it.[7][10]

What Care Infrastructure Really Is

Care is routinely treated as a “soft” issue — something to address only after the “real” economic questions have been settled. That is a costly mistake. Care infrastructure is economic infrastructure.

By care infrastructure, we mean the publicly funded and regulated systems that make it possible for people to give and receive care across the life course:

•        Childcare and early childhood education

•        Long-term care and support for older persons

•        Disability support services

•        Community-based health and social services

•        The paid workforce that provides all of the above[6][9]

When care infrastructure is adequate, it enables mothers to enter and remain in the workforce, supports healthy child development, protects the dignity and independence of older persons and people with disabilities, creates decent jobs (often for women) in the care sector, and distributes the costs of care broadly across society rather than concentrating them in women’s lives.[7][9]

When care infrastructure is inadequate — underfunded, inaccessible, unaffordable, or simply absent — all of these functions collapse back onto households. And within households, they collapse onto women.

Across Asia Pacific, public care systems remain chronically underdeveloped. Childcare coverage is low. Long-term care lags dangerously behind rapid population ageing. Disability support is fragmented and underfunded. Paid care workers are poorly compensated and often excluded from social protection. None of this is an inevitable stage of development. It is the consequence of policy choices that treat care as a private responsibility rather than a public investment.[6][9]

The Numbers Behind the Silence

The invisibility of unpaid care work in official statistics is not merely a technical oversight. It is a political one.

Time-use surveys across Asia and the Pacific consistently show that women spend far more hours each day on unpaid care and domestic work than men — often two to three times as many. In some countries, women’s total unpaid work time exceeds men’s combined paid and unpaid work time. Yet this labour is excluded entirely from GDP.[10][6]

If unpaid care work were valued at even the minimum wage, it would represent a significant share of national income in every country in the region. It functions as a massive, hidden subsidy — transferred from women to the wider economy, without recognition, compensation, or legal rights.[7][9]

Meanwhile, formal social protection coverage remains dangerously thin. The ILO’s World Social Protection Report estimates that approximately 2.1 billion people globally have no access to any social protection; a disproportionate share are women in Asia and the Pacific, working informally or precariously while simultaneously shouldering heavy care responsibilities. For these women, falling sick, losing income, or pausing work to care for a family member can threaten their families’ basic survival.[7]

Three Ways States Retreat

State retreat from care responsibility takes different forms, but three patterns recur consistently across the region.

1. Underfunded Public Systems

In many countries, public health, education, and social care systems exist in name but are chronically starved of resources. Hospitals lack staff and equipment. Schools lack teachers and materials. Community-based social services carry waiting lists measured in months or years.[9][7]

The result is a de facto two-tier system: those who can afford private alternatives use them; those who cannot rely on overstretched public services. When the public system fails to meet needs, care is pushed back into the home — onto women, without pay or protection. A woman who quits or reduces paid work to provide long-term care is, in effect, performing functions that belong to a properly resourced public system. She simply isn’t paid for doing so.[6][9]

2. Unaffordable Private Markets

In other contexts, the state has retreated from direct provision and handed care over to the market. Childcare, aged care, and disability support may be nominally available in cities and wealthier districts — but at prices well beyond the reach of most households.[11][9]

This pattern is common in rapidly urbanising middle-income countries where women’s labour force participation is rising but care is still treated as a private consumer good rather than a social right. A mother returning to work may find that formal childcare fees consume a third or more of her income. Faced with this arithmetic, families rely on informal arrangements, older female relatives, or women’s complete withdrawal from paid employment.[9][6]

3. Policy Gaps

The third form of state retreat is inaction. Demographic and economic changes have outpaced policy design by years, sometimes decades.

Population ageing is advancing rapidly in East and Southeast Asia, yet long-term care systems, financing models, and workforce strategies remain in early or embryonic stages. In the vacuum left by absent policy, the default solution is family care — and within families, women’s unpaid labour fills the gap.[6]

At the same time, the explosive rise of gig and platform work has created vast cohorts of workers — disproportionately young and disproportionately women — who fall outside traditional labour law and social protection frameworks. Governments have been slow to adapt social insurance, minimum standards, and care-related protections to cover these workers. The gap between the pace of economic transformation and the pace of policy response is not gender-neutral: women pay the price.[12][7]

The Political Economy of Invisible Labour

Why does this pattern persist, even in countries that formally commit to gender equality and social protection? The answer lies in political economy.

From the perspective of public finance, unpaid care work is extraordinarily convenient. It delivers essential social functions — raising children, caring for older persons, supporting people with disabilities — at zero cost to public budgets. When demand rises, supply expands “automatically,” because gender norms and social expectations compel women and girls to fill whatever gap the state leaves open.[7][9]

Replacing that unpaid labour with publicly funded or subsidised services is expensive. It demands long-term investment, a trained and fairly compensated care workforce, and political leaders willing to prioritise care infrastructure on the same terms as roads, ports, and digital networks. In an environment dominated by fiscal conservatism and short electoral cycles, such investments are repeatedly deferred, deprioritised, or diluted.[11][9]

The outcome is a political economy in which the costs of care are systematically and silently transferred from the state onto women’s time and lost income — and in which this transfer is hidden by statistical frameworks that exclude unpaid work from “the economy.” There is nothing natural or inevitable about this equilibrium. It is the product of political choices, and it can be changed by political choices.[6][7]

What Social Democrats Must Demand

For social democrats in Asia Pacific, confronting this political economy leads to a clear and urgent agenda.

• Measure unpaid care. Governments must conduct regular time-use surveys and develop satellite accounts that estimate the monetary value of unpaid care work. What is not measured cannot be debated, funded, or changed.[10][7]

• Invest in care as infrastructure. Public spending on childcare, long-term care, and disability support should be treated as economic investment, not social expenditure. Evidence consistently shows that investing in care raises women’s labour force participation, improves outcomes for children and older persons, and generates decent employment.[11][9]

• Protect the care workforce. The paid care workforce — childcare staff, elder-care workers, disability support workers, community health workers — is predominantly female and routinely underpaid and underprotected. Building functional care systems means ensuring decent work: fair wages, safe conditions, social insurance coverage, and genuine career pathways.[9][7]

• Redistribute care within households. Policy can actively promote a more equal distribution of care between women and men, through non-transferable parental leave for fathers, flexible work arrangements that do not penalise caregivers, and tax and benefit structures that actively support dual-earner households.[10][6]

• Make care a regional agenda. In a region defined by labour migration and cross-border care chains, care policy cannot be addressed by national governments alone. Regional dialogue and binding minimum standards on social protection, migrant workers’ rights, and care guarantees are essential.[7][6]

Conclusion: Ending an Unpaid Subsidy

For decades, the growth story of Asia and the Pacific has rested on a subsidy that was never negotiated, never acknowledged, and never repaid. Women’s unpaid labour has stabilised households through crisis after crisis, substituted for underfunded public services generation after generation, and quietly underpinned the success stories that governments proudly claim as their own.[3][9]

The cost has been borne exclusively by women — in lost income, stalled careers, constrained choices, and the invisible exhaustion of a lifetime of work that official statistics categorise as “not economic.” The state’s systematic retreat from responsibility for care is not the result of natural forces or historical necessity. It is a choice. And like any political choice, it can be reversed.

When the state steps back, women step in. We have documented that pattern. We have named its costs. The task now is to build the political power and regional solidarity needed to demand a different settlement — one in which care is recognised, valued, and collectively shared, and in which the economies of our region are no longer built on the invisibility and disposability of women’s unpaid work.[3][6]

This is Part 4 of the “Who Is This Crisis For?” series, a weekly editorial series by SocDem Asia Pacific leading up to the “Regional Solidarity in Times of Crisis” webinar in August 2026.

Read Part 1: “The Feminized Face of Economic Crisis: Why Social Protection Must Be at the Heart of Regional Solidarity.”

Read Part 2: “She Has Three Jobs and None of Them Count: The Real Face of Women’s Work in Asia Pacific.”

Read Part 3: “Born Into Precarity: Why Young Women in Asia Pacific Are Inheriting a Broken Labour Market.”

The profiles mentioned in this article are composite portraits drawn from documented patterns across the Asia Pacific region.

Sources

•          ILO, World Social Protection Report (latest edition), chapters on Asia and the Pacific and gender gaps in coverage.[7]

•          ESCAP, Asia-Pacific Regional Report on Beijing+25/30 and regional reports on women’s economic empowerment and unpaid care.[6]

•          UN Women, Asia-Pacific briefs on unpaid care and domestic work and COVID-19 impacts on women’s work.[10]

•          ADB, reports on social protection, care, and women’s labour force participation in Asia and the Pacific.[9][10]

•          National time-use surveys and gender statistics from selected countries in the region (e.g. Republic of Korea, Thailand, India, Indonesia).[10]