Austerity Never Cancels the Cost of Care: It Sends the Bill to Mothers

By Lina Qendil

The paper makes visible a debt that no ledger records: every cut to a public service is a forced loan against the time and income of mothers, one that, unlike sovereign debt, is never scrutinised.

Austerity is usually justified as a way of repaying public debt. But it does not abolish the need for care. When a nursery closes, a home-care service is curtailed or a benefit is frozen, someone still looks after the child, the sick relative or the ageing parent. That work is transferred, without compensation or consent, onto the household, and mostly onto mothers.

This is the off-balance-sheet debt of care.

The paper identifies three clear channels through which it is incurred. Public childcare and health services are pared back, as in Greece and Portugal after 2010. Social benefits are also steeply reduced: in the UK, for instance, roughly 85% of the savings from the 2010s welfare reforms came out of women’s incomes. And feminised public-sector jobs are frozen or axed: women make up 69.2% of public-sector workers in the EU, and in the United Kingdom, they accounted for 56.1% of job losses over 2009–11, against 37.3% in 2007–09. Mothers then forfeit income and absorb more unpaid caregiving hours at the same time.

This debt is never dormant and idle. It inexorably accrues over a woman’s life.

In the EU in 2022, 28% of employed women worked part-time, against 8% of men, mostly because of care responsibilities that are not equally shared. This “child penalty” explains more than 80% of the gender earnings gap in rich countries. It then entrenches wider structural inequality: a pay gap that opens at motherhood does not close on its own, but is carried through every later hiring, promotion and work-life decision. And it pinnacles in old age: in 2024, the gender pension gap in the EU stood at close to 25%.

A woman who absorbs a childcare cut in her thirties may still be paying its arrears on her pension statement forty years down the line.

This is not only an economic question, but a human rights one. It is indeed striking to see how far international law has already acknowledged the problem. SDG target 5.4 commits States to value unpaid care. In 2013, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty, Magdalena Sepúlveda, framed unpaid care as a human rights issue. In 2018, her successor Philip Alston applied the same reasoning to United Kingdom austerity, and the then Independent Expert on foreign debt, Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky, called for gender impact assessments of economic reforms. The CEDAW Committee has also censured both the United Kingdom and Greece for the effects of austerity on women. The principle is thus unmistakable: a policy does not need to mention women to discriminate against them.

The paper follows this thread of thought through three contexts: the 2025 US budget reconciliation package, which cut Medicaid and childcare assistance; IMF-linked adjustment programmes in the Global South; and Greece, where the number of permanent public servants fell by 18% between 2009 and 2015.

So, what should be done? The paper’s recommendations follow one logic: measure the debt, prevent it, and subsequently repay it.

Measuring means regular time-use surveys and legal recognition of the motherhood penalty. Preventing means mandatory, public gender impact assessments before any fiscal reform, so that the care time transferred onto households appears as a cost next to the savings claimed, and “social floor” clauses safeguarding care budgets in national budgets and IMF programmes. Repaying means investing in care as essential social infrastructure, non-transferable parental leave for both parents, and pension care credits for years spent caring.

For years, governments have asked mothers to absorb the shocks of public budgets. The question is no longer whether societies can afford to invest in care, but whether they can keep affording the cost of not doing so.

Genuine fiscal responsibility cannot mean moving a cost off public accounts and onto households, where it is never recorded or compensated. Every cut to care is not a saving but a transfer of cost from the State to women, specifically mothers.

How can governments make the hidden costs of austerity visible, prevent fiscal reforms from deepening gender inequality, and ensure that care is recognised as essential social infrastructure?

Our policy paper sets out concrete recommendations to measure the off-balance-sheet debt of care, prevent fiscal reforms from shifting costs onto women, and invest in care as essential social infrastructure.

Explore the evidence and recommendations in the full paper.

Read the position paper