Caring Without Pay: The Critical Role of Women in Asia’s Unpaid Care Economy

A groundbreaking ADB and UC Berkeley study reveals that unpaid care work in Asia largely performed by women, especially older women is essential yet invisible in economic planning. Despite aging populations, there is no looming care crisis if current caregiving patterns and gender roles persist.

In a groundbreaking study by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the University of California, Berkeley, researcher Gretchen Donehower shines a spotlight on one of the most undervalued economic forces in Asia: unpaid care work. Using the National Time Transfer Accounts (NTTA) framework developed through the Counting Women’s Work project, a global initiative within the National Transfer Accounts network, this research maps the time, value, and transfer of unpaid domestic labor across age and gender. The analysis spans seven Asian and Pacific countries, Bangladesh, India, Mongolia, the Republic of Korea, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam, delivering a bold new narrative: older people, particularly older women, are not a burden on the care economy but its primary contributors.

More Than a Crisis of Aging

Contrary to widespread fears of an impending “care crisis” driven by population aging, the study finds that the real care burden does not fall on society’s oldest members. While older people are expected to be major consumers of care, the data show that they continue to provide significant unpaid care to younger generations, especially women, who remain active caregivers well into their later years. Children, not elders, consume the bulk of unpaid care time, especially in their early years, which require intense, round-the-clock attention. In many cases, this responsibility is shouldered by grandparents, reinforcing the critical role of older women in family-based care systems.

This challenges alarmist projections that an aging population will inevitably overwhelm healthcare and family support systems. Instead, the findings suggest a more complex and sustainable pattern of intergenerational support, albeit one heavily reliant on gendered labor norms that go largely uncompensated and unrecognized in official statistics.

The Gendered Architecture of Labor

At the heart of the unpaid care economy is a deep gender divide. Across all seven countries, women consistently contribute more to unpaid domestic and care work, while men dominate the realm of paid labor. Yet, the nature of this division differs. In Bangladesh and Turkey, for example, gender roles are sharply divided, with women immersed in household duties and men active in the market economy. In Mongolia and Vietnam, women and men share market work more equally, but unpaid domestic tasks still fall disproportionately on women. Meanwhile, India, Thailand, and the Republic of Korea reflect a “double burden” scenario, where women balance both market work and heavy care responsibilities, and men contribute little to unpaid care.

Even in older age, this pattern persists. The report shows that men’s work declines steadily as they retire from the market, while women continue performing unpaid care at almost the same levels. In effect, many women never retire. The care economy remains their responsibility until the very end, underscoring the need for policy attention to this unbalanced labor burden.

How Much Care, and For Whom?

Using national time use surveys, the NTTA methodology quantifies both the production and consumption of unpaid care. It distinguishes between direct care, childcare, eldercare, and community care, and indirect care, such as cooking, cleaning, and managing households. Children under 15 are by far the largest consumers of direct care across all countries. The data also show that adult care needs are modest on average, though they may be underreported due to the difficulty of measuring care activities like check-ins or emotional support that often go unclassified in surveys.

Transfers of care, defined as the difference between what a person produces and consumes, highlight young adults as the primary net contributors and children as the largest net receivers. Older people generally balance out, producing about as much as they consume. However, when disaggregated by gender, older women emerge as significant net givers, while older men are more likely to be net receivers, especially of indirect care.

What the Future Holds

The study overlays these patterns with population projections from the United Nations to assess future supply and demand. The key insight? Asia is not facing a care supply shortage if current behaviors hold. Declining fertility could reduce the time needed for childcare, freeing up time that could be reallocated to adult and elder care. However, this hinges on the continued availability of unpaid caregivers, primarily women.

An alternative scenario modeled in the report considers the “quantity–quality” trade-off: fewer children might lead to more time spent per child. This would maintain current care workloads, potentially improving child development and long-term human capital. But it also means that care time would not be available for aging adults, again spotlighting the need for policies that broaden the caregiving base beyond women.

Policy Must Catch Up to Reality

The report concludes with a pressing call for policymakers to take unpaid care work seriously. Governments must invest in better data, especially around eldercare, and design policies that recognize and support unpaid caregivers. This includes providing pensions, healthcare access, and legal protections for older women, who are often left vulnerable despite their contributions. Encouraging greater male participation in caregiving, professionalizing care services, and supporting flexible work arrangements for family caregivers are also essential steps.

Ultimately, Donehower’s study reframes unpaid care as not just a private or familial concern but as a foundational pillar of national economies. It is time to recognize, value, and support the invisible labor that sustains households, communities, and entire nations. Asia’s care economy isn’t collapsing, it’s silently bearing the weight of demographic change. Whether it can continue to do so equitably and sustainably depends on the choices policymakers make today.