ILO-Magdalene social experiment: Women spend 100 hours of unpaid care work a week

The International Labour Organization and Indonesian media organization Magdalene asked five women to record a week of unpaid care. Four exceeded the hours of a standard full-time job; one reached 103.58 hours. The total is striking, but so is the work’s fragmentation across the day. Cooking, cleaning, transport, companionship, reminders, tending illness, and remaining on call rarely form a continuous shift that institutions readily recognize as work.

The diaries also show why labor-force participation is not a simple yes-or-no choice. Care determines which jobs women can accept, whether they can commute or work overtime, when they sleep, and whether any time remains for study or public life. Paid employment often ends only for a second shift to begin at home. Calling this outcome women’s preference for family conceals the constraints produced together by missing services, rigid schedules, unequal male participation, and weak social protection.

The experiment is small and cannot replace a national time-use survey. Its value is to return rhythm and bodily cost to the statistical category of unpaid care. The answer is not gratitude for mothers or better personal efficiency, but the linked work of recognizing, reducing, and redistributing care: public childcare and long-term support, basic infrastructure, family-compatible labor rules, and men’s ordinary rather than symbolic participation. Time is not merely a private asset. Who possesses uninterrupted time is itself a distribution of economic and gender power.