On September 29, 2023, MenCare hosted the fourth webinar in the CARING series, “Invest in Care and Measure it Disaggregated by Gender, Social Class, and Age,” highlighting strategic recommendations from the State of the World’s Fathers report, featuring distinguished panelists from the World Bank, International Labour Organization, Center for Global Development, and Equimundo.
About the webinar:
The current economic system is not working. In the context of increasing inequalities and climate crisis, it continues to focus on profit alone, and as the UK’s Women’s Budget Group notes, “has treated the earth, nature and people carelessly in pursuit of profit…Responding to these crises requires redesigning the economy around care.”
An economy based on care rather than profit could even be a richer economy – one estimate found that equalizing labor force participation rates between men and women would add $11 trillion to the global economy over a decade.
Gender budgeting is now something that many governments recognize as a useful tool to expose how gender inequalities are embedded in public policies and allocate resources to close gender gaps, but this budgeting rarely includes a perspective on men and boys.
Investing in care makes good social sense. It is good for our well-being. But it also makes economic sense. And to do it properly, an investment plan for care systems needs to take gender and other intersecting inequalities into account and to include men.