The Bible relates that, before and during the crucifixion, Jesus was accompanied by three women: Mary, his mother, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Clopas. It is not surprising that, two millennia later, the image of a caregiver is still feminine: a mother, an aunt, a sister. This cultural heritage today has an overwhelming statistical weight.
According to a 2025 study by the IDB, AFD and OECD, there are nearly 25 million unpaid caregivers in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 60% are women. In Costa Rica, the gap is even more significant: according to IDESPO-UNA, 73% of unpaid caregivers are women, who devote an average of 53 hours a week to these tasks.
To put it in perspective, the ordinary working day in the country is 48 hours. This means that Costa Rican caregivers work a full day plus five hours of overtime each week, without receiving a single colon in return.
The Paradox of Visibility
The Central Bank of Costa Rica has determined that unpaid domestic work – including care and housework – is equivalent to 20% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). If this work were contracted in the formal market, the country would have to pay the astronomical figure of ₡9.6 billion colones.
The comparison with other sectors is revealing. The industrial and manufacturing sector (medical devices, food, construction) generates between 20% and 22% of GDP. However, there is an abysmal difference: the industry is monetized and transactional. When one of these companies reduces operations or leaves the country, it is national news. Domestic work, which provides equivalent value, occurs in the silence of the home and does not generate headlines.
The current economic system rewards the production of goods and services but ignores the production and maintenance of the labor force that generates them. During the Second Industrial Revolution, in seeking an increase in productivity, a “family wage” was established with a 40% increase for women to take care of families.
Since then, the productive system has fractured in two: dependent and independent people. Historically, women have been relegated to the first group, working without pay under a premise of “duty” or “love”. In reality, the system is not self-sufficient: it is women who, with their unpaid time and effort, are subsidizing the national economy.
A necessary recognition
Unpaid caregivers not only lack a salary that allows them economic autonomy. They also face the absence of conditions that allow them to break out of cycles of economic dependence on other relatives or close friends.
They do not contribute to social security, which will prevent them from accessing a retirement, nor do they have a guarantee of good working conditions, such as limits on working hours, the right to vacations, or the payment of Christmas bonuses. These conditions are far from fulfilling the global development agenda that aspires to decent work and economic growth.
Against this backdrop, the care economy must stop being just a topic of conversation and become an axis of business action. Companies can contribute to caregivers having more dignified conditions by granting benefits and economic incentives to their workers, such as subsidies or reimbursements for daycare services or day centers for the elderly; to maintain labour flexibility measures that allow workers to combine their jobs with care, and to facilitate training and awareness programmes on the co-responsibility of care, between men and women.
The recognition of the care economy is not a social concession, but a debt of economic justice that the system refuses to pay. When a society allows 20% of its GDP to be provided by people who receive neither wages nor social protection, it is using a kind of poverty subsidy to maintain its economic growth. At the end of the day, an economy that does not take care of those who care is an economy destined to exhaustion.