During Women's Month, it is necessary to acknowledge a complex truth: unpaid labor by women supports the economy, yet their work remains unnoticed. It is time to replace praise with action and address systemic inequality that burdens women.
Every failure in public services generates a bill that women often have to pay. When childcare services are unavailable, someone has to stay home. If clinics are hard to reach, someone takes care of the sick. In times of food shortages, someone must figure out how to stretch existing supplies. This person is most likely to be a woman.
"Women's work" is not reflected in national accounts, municipal reports, or government budgets. It is described as duty, motherhood, sacrifice, or, especially during Women's Month, resilience. However, South Africa must face an unpleasant truth: the country runs on an invisible social welfare system financed by the time, labor, health, and lost opportunities of women.
Every year, South Africa commemorates women who marched to the Union buildings on August 9, 1956. Nevertheless, their legacy should prompt us to do more than simply laud women's strength. It should demand an analysis of why women are still forced to bear the burden created by unequal households, inadequate public services, and an economy that undervalues care.
The language of resilience can inspire, but it can also mask institutional failures. A woman who wakes up early to fetch water due to the lack of a reliable source in her community may be resilient. A grandmother supporting several children on a limited stipend may be resourceful. A mother who declines paid work because childcare costs more than her earnings may be making a rational decision. But these are not just stories of courage—they are also evidence of failing systems.
Unpaid care is economic infrastructure
South Africa recognizes roads, electricity, transport, and telecommunications as infrastructure because the economy cannot function without them. However, the economy also cannot operate if someone is not caring for children, cooking, cleaning homes, supporting the elderly, or looking after sick or disabled relatives. This unpaid care supports workers, businesses, and institutions upon which the formal economy depends.
Thus, women are not only excluded from parts of the formal economy; their unpaid labor subsidizes it. The absence of payment does not mean the work has no value. It means the cost has been shifted onto the woman performing the work—she pays through interrupted education, loss of income, slowed career progression, exhaustion, and weakened financial independence.
When services fail, the burden shifts
Failures in public services do not disappear; they are redistributed. Unreliable plumbing leads to hours spent searching for and carrying water. Insufficient healthcare turns into unpaid home care. Lack of accessible childcare forces women out of work, education, or business. Unsafe transport results in job losses and restricted mobility. Food insecurity becomes the emotional and practical burden of deciding who will eat.
This is crucial for human rights. The Constitution of South Africa guarantees women equality, dignity, access to healthcare, food, water, and social protection, prohibiting direct and indirect gender discrimination. These guarantees, supported by the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act, the Bill of Rights, and the Maputo Protocol, require the state to eliminate systemic inequality and ensure that inadequate public services and obligations for unpaid care do not continue to place a disproportionate burden on women.
Women may formally enjoy rights to dignity, equality, healthcare, food, water, and social protection. But when accessing these rights requires excessive unpaid labor, multiple trips, long waits, and personal sacrifices, these rights are realized unevenly. Women often become informal service providers that constitutional institutions should provide.
Not all women carry the same burden
Women do not experience this pressure equally. A professional woman may face unequal expectations regarding childcare and career advancement, while a rural woman may spend hours traveling to transport, healthcare, or water. A domestic worker may care for another family's children while simultaneously fighting to secure care for her own. A woman with a disability may face inaccessible transport, buildings, and information. An elderly woman may become the primary caregiver for grandchildren and unemployed relatives.
Poor women bear the heaviest burden because they cannot easily afford alternatives. Wealth allows for private transport, domestic help, childcare, and medical care. Poverty turns every institutional failure into additional unpaid work.
This creates temporary poverty. A woman who spends hours obtaining basic services has less time for paid work, education, leisure, political participation, and personal development. She may not be formally excluded from economic life, but the demands placed on her time make meaningful participation extremely difficult.
What needs to change
Women's Month must go beyond merely praising women for surviving in systems that need transformation. Firstly, South Africa must regularly measure unpaid care. National time-use surveys should show who performs unpaid work, how much time it takes, and how service failures increase this burden.
Secondly, government departments and municipalities must implement gender time impact assessments. Before closing, relocating, digitizing, or cutting a service, authorities must ask whether this will increase the time women spend obtaining water, healthcare, transport, childcare, food, or social assistance.
Thirdly, care must be recognized as essential social and economic infrastructure. Accessible childcare, public care, affordable healthcare, and caregiver support are necessary for women's economic participation.
Fourthly, care responsibilities must be redistributed. Men must take on a fairer share of household duties. Employers must support childcare without penalizing women's careers. The government must provide services that do not allow care obligations to overwhelm households.
Finally, gender equality should not be measured solely by the number of women employed, running businesses, or holding leadership positions. We must also ask what volume of invisible work they perform before and after the workday.
Stop celebrating exhaustion
The women of 1956 did not march so that future generations would become more efficient at enduring inequality. They marched because unjust systems needed to be criticized and changed. This Women's Month, South Africa must stop romanticizing women's exhaustion. Women should not endlessly compensate for service failures, inadequate care systems, and unequal household responsibilities.
A society that relies on women's unpaid labor but refuses to recognize its value is not expanding women's rights—it is profiting from their inequality. The most significant tribute South Africa can pay to women is not another celebration of how much they can endure. It is the commitment to ensuring they no longer have to carry so much. Until women's time, care, and unpaid labor are reflected in budgets, policies, and accountability systems, women will continue to subsidize the country with their lives. And they will continue to pay the bill.
