Investing in Women’s Work Is Smart Economics

The following article is a guest post from Dr. Shubha Nagesh and Ana Ortega. The opinions expressed here are their own.

September marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, one of the most comprehensive global commitments to advance women’s rights. In 1995, 189 countries affirmed that women’s rights are human rights and pledged to expand women’s access to education, healthcare, and decent work, while recognizing the economic value of unpaid labor.

Two decades later, world leaders adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Among them, SDG 8, promoting Decent Work and Economic Growth, is the engine that powers the rest. Without decent work for women, we cannot reduce poverty (SDG 1), ensure health and well-being (SDG 3), achieve gender equality (SDG 5), or build resilience to climate and economic shocks.

But thirty years after Beijing, and with just five years left to achieve the SDGs, the gap between political promises and lived reality is widening. One central reason: governments have failed to prioritize decent work, especially for women in the health and care workforce.

Globally, women account for  70% of the healthcare workforce and 95% of all frontline health workers, but only one in four hold leadership positions. Women bear a “triple burden”: paid employment, often insecure or underpaid, combined with unpaid domestic work and caregiving responsibilities. Even when employed full-time, women spend significantly more hours than men on housework and childcare.

As a result, many women remain trapped in low-wage, insecure, or informal jobs with little protection. Their contributions sustain health systems worldwide, yet their rights, compensation, and safety are routinely neglected. At this year’s UN High-Level Political Forum, a review of the SDGs revealed that only 26% of countries track how resources are spent on gender equality. Women’s work is not prioritized in most national plans.

As Senior Atlantic Fellows for Health Equity, working with women community health workers in India and Mexico, we see the consequences of this neglect every day. Women are delivering essential care under exploitative conditions: leading vaccination campaigns, supporting maternal and child health, and filling the gaps left by under-resourced systems.

In India, Accredited Social Health Activists and Anganwadi workers anchor rural health systems, yet they are still not recognized as formal employees, lack job security, and often earn below minimum wage. In Mexico, rural women shoulder heavier unpaid care burdens than their urban counterparts, and most community health workers are volunteers without social protections.

These stories are global. “Cost-effective” health interventions too often rely on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women. Community health workers lack supplies, supervision, and training. The gender pay gap persists across regions. And the care economy, vital to both health and livelihoods and powered mostly by women, remains systematically undervalued.

Investing in women’s work is not only a matter of justice, it is also smart economics. The International Labour Organization estimates that expanding the health and care economy could create nearly 300 million jobs by 2035, most of them for women. Closing the gender pay gap would boost household incomes, increase consumer spending, and raise GDP.

Yet during the COVID-19 pandemic, governments directed recovery spending toward male-dominated industries, leaving women in health and care behind. This was a missed opportunity to advance both equity and growth.

As we approach the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration, leaders must move beyond rhetoric to real investment and reform. That means paying and protecting women in health and care with fair wages and legal recognition. It means treating the health and care economy as essential infrastructure, backed by stable funding and decent jobs. It means guaranteeing rights for all workers–migrants, caregivers, and those in informal roles. It means publishing gender-disaggregated data to expose inequities and drive accountability. And it means ensuring women are at the decision-making table where policies on health, labor, and economic recovery are made.

The Beijing Declaration and the SDGs are not optional checklists, they are a roadmap for justice, equity, and resilience. We cannot achieve them without decent work for women, and we cannot achieve decent work without valuing women’s labor in health and care. Women have carried the world’s health and care systems for generations. Now, the world must acknowledge their contributions.

About the authors: Dr. Shubha Nagesh is presently Advocacy Advisor, Global Health at Women in Global Health, and is based in Dehradun, India. Ana Ortega has worked with community mental health workers in Chiapas, Mexico for the last six years. They are both Senior Atlantic Fellows for Health Equity.