In no country in the world are men doing as much childcare or domestic work as women are. Globally, women are spending more than twice as much time as men on unpaid care work. These unequal care responsibilities are a barrier to gender equality, to economic opportunities and development, and to the full realization of women’s rights. Yet men’s involvement in caregiving has too often been missing from the international development agenda, public policies aimed at gender equality, and other efforts to promote women’s empowerment.
MenCare presented the webinar “Men and Equality in Unpaid Care” on June 30, 2016, featuring Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed, research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, and Nikki van der Gaag, independent gender consultant, author, and Equimundo Senior Fellow. The keynote speakers discussed key global issues in unpaid care and strategies to increase men’s caregiving. Their presentation included an overview of MenCare’s Parental Leave Platform and an advance preview of its Unpaid Care Platform.
MenCare friends and partners around the world also shared how these advocacy platforms can be taken on at the national level. Presenters included: Cristina Castellanos, Priya Álvarez, Ana Álvarez, and Isabel Izquierdo (PLENT, Spain); Wessel van den Berg (Sonke Gender Justice, South Africa); and Oswaldo Montoya (MenEngage Global Alliance, United States) and Eduardo Cárcamo (Plataforma de Paternidades, Peru).
Watch the Webinar:
About the Keynote Speakers:
Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed is a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and a human geographer with extensive experience in gender, urbanization, and international development, mainly around the informal economy in Nigerian cities, and specifically on paid domestic workers in Lagos. Zahrah has an MSc in Urbanization and Development from the London School of Economics (LSE) and a PhD in Human Geography and Urban Studies, also from the LSE. Zahrah has undertaken research on a range of issues related to the economic empowerment of women and girls’, including making unpaid care work visible in public policy, balancing paid work and unpaid care work, exploring the impact of social protection on rural women’s economic empowerment and the shifting roles of men in addressing sexual and gender-based violence. Zahrah has expertise on qualitative research methodologies, issues of intersectionality, internal labour migration and everyday resistance.
Nikki van der Gaag is an independent consultant who works on gender in development, with a particular focus on girls and on men and gender equality, and a Senior Fellow at Equimundo. She co-authored the first ever State of the World’s Fathers report in 2015. Her latest book is Feminism and Men (Zed Press, 2014). Nikki has also authored The No-Nonsense Guide to Women’s Rights (New Internationalist/Verso, 2008), and six State of the World’s Girls reports for Plan International, including one on boys and gender equality. She is a member of the International Advisory Board for Young Lives, an Oxford University study on child poverty; director of Just Change UK; and an advisory trustee of the Great Men Initiative and New Internationalist magazine.