Across the world, women’s participation in the economy is shaped not only by access to jobs, education, or finance, but also by unpaid care work, which is something far less visible. Cooking, cleaning, childcare, and caring for family members remain largely the domain of women, which limits their time, income, and economic opportunities. Global estimates from UN Women data hub show that women spend nearly three times more hours on unpaid domestic and care work than men, making unpaid labor one of the largest structural barriers to gender equality in the workforce.
In Ethiopia, this imbalance is even more pronounced. According to UN Women Data, Ethiopian women and girls aged 10 and above spend 19.3% of their day on unpaid domestic and care work, compared to only 6.6% for men. This means women spend nearly three times as much time on unpaid responsibilities as men every single day. The disparity shows a broader regional pattern across Sub-Saharan Africa, where weak childcare systems, limited social protection, and entrenched gender norms continue to shift the burden of care onto women. However, Ethiopia’s numbers remain significantly above the global average for women’s unpaid care burden, highlighting the scale of the challenge.
Care work also has substantial consequences for women’s employment. Unpaid care work directly limits women’s ability to participate in the formal paid sector in Ethiopia. According to the International Labour Organization, women in Ethiopia spend an average of 4.85 hours per day on unpaid care work, compared to 2.08 hours for men, while the country’s female labour force participation rate remains 27.1 percentage points lower than men’s. These figures illustrate what economists increasingly describe as “time poverty,” where women carry dual responsibilities of paid and unpaid labor with limited institutional support. The result is not only lower labor force participation, but also concentration in low-paying, informal, and insecure work.
Recent evidence from the UN Women further shows that limited access to affordable and quality childcare services in Ethiopia significantly increases women’s unpaid care burden and widens gender disparities in the labor market. Ethiopia’s supportive framework indicators remain weak, with childcare systems identified as one of the lowest-performing areas in assessments of women’s economic inclusion. In practice, this means millions of women are expected to balance economic participation with nearly full responsibility for caregiving, often without public services or workplace support. The burden is especially visible in national employment patterns. According to the 2024 report, Determining the Ethiopian Women’s Status & Priorities, 41.3 percent of women were primarily engaged in domestic work, while only 27.3 percent participated exclusively in productive employment during the week preceding the survey. An additional 17.8 percent balanced both productive and domestic activities, meaning nearly half of Ethiopian women operate within a “double burden” of paid and unpaid labor. This distribution reveals that women are overextended within the economy.
Globally, economists increasingly recognize unpaid care work as a major economic issue rather than a private household matter. The World Bank estimates that closing gender gaps in employment and supportive systems such as childcare could increase global GDP by more than 20%. Research consistently shows that investments in childcare services increase women’s employment rates, reduce vulnerability to informal work, and improve long-term economic productivity. Yet in Ethiopia, childcare infrastructure remains fragmented and inaccessible for most families, particularly in rural and low-income communities. Public investment in the care economy remains limited, and workplace childcare services are still uncommon outside formal institutions and government offices. Without these systems, women continue to absorb the hidden costs of social reproduction through unpaid labor that remains economically undervalued despite sustaining households and communities.
This disconnect between economic participation and economic empowerment reveals a structural issue. Ethiopia’s challenge is no longer simply getting women into the economy; women are already there. The challenge is creating systems that allow them to participate equally, sustainably, and with fair returns. Until unpaid care work is recognized, reduced, and redistributed through stronger public policies and support systems, women’s employment in Ethiopia will continue to be constrained not by lack of effort or ambition, but by the invisible labor that underpins the entire economy.
This story was supported by Code for Africa’s WanaData initiative and the Digital Democracy Initiative as part of the Digitalise Youth project, funded by the European Partnership for Democracy (EPD) Code for Africa’s WanaData initiative
