Gender, migration and care deficits: what role for the sustainable development goals?

Sarah Gammage and Natacha Stevanovic examine a central contradiction in global development: migrant women fill care deficits in destination countries while their departure can reorganize or deepen care deficits in the households and communities they leave. The article places this movement of labor within the Sustainable Development Goals, where commitments to gender equality, decent work, reduced inequality, and social protection often sit in separate policy compartments. “Care deficit” names more than an absent individual caregiver; it points to the gap between socially necessary care and the time, services, rights, and resources available to provide it.

This framework makes migration governance answerable to feminist economics. Receiving countries benefit from workers who sustain households and aging populations, yet restrictive status and exclusions from labor protection can make those workers unusually dependent on employers. Sending countries may celebrate remittances while overlooking the paid and unpaid work redistributed to grandmothers, daughters, partners, or poorly supported substitutes. By connecting these scales, the authors challenge policies that count income crossing borders but fail to count the care, time, and emotional labor that also move through transnational families.

The SDGs offer useful leverage because they invite governments to connect migration, labor, and gender commitments, but their breadth is also a limitation: targets do not enforce themselves, and national indicators can miss household power or workers with irregular status. The article is best read as a policy map rather than a complete account of migrants’ varied agency and family strategies. For FemRes, its importance lies in turning the language of a “care crisis” into questions of responsibility: which states and employers benefit, who absorbs the social cost, and what forms of public care provision, portable rights, and worker protection could prevent one society’s solution from becoming another household’s deprivation?