Unlocking the Power of Care: Skills, Equity, and Social Transformation

📆  Wednesday 5 February
⏰  10:00-11:15 New York/ 16:00-17:15 Paris
📍 Online

👉 Register here

Background information

Unpaid care work—including child-rearing, elder care, household management, community care, etc.—provides the social foundations that allow economies and societies to function. Without this invisible labour, formal labour markets and social cohesion would collapse.

Yet, unpaid caregivers lack the recognition and support they deserve, and its inequal distribution remains a root cause of inequality, and a cause for much economic and social injustice for women, in particular when they are mothers. Because it is unpaid (or underpaid) this vital work is also often discarded as unproductive and unskilled.

The reality is that care work, in particular unpaid family care work like parenting, builds a wide set of transferable skills, including organisational, managerial, relational and life skills, which are all very much in demand in the Labour market and more generally very much needed to address the multiple challenges we face.

Recognising that unpaid care work is indeed work and that it does develop skills is an important step in recognising the value of this vital work, which fuels social development.

Our side-event proposes to raise awareness about this overlooked facet of caregiving, and discuss how the recognition of these skills can be a pathway to recognising and valuing the work of caring, advance gender equality, as well as social development and social justice.

Provisional list of speakers: 

• Lisa S. Kaplowitz, Associate Professor of Professional Practice in Finance & Economics; and Co-founder and Executive Director, Rutgers Center for Women in Business (CWIB), Rutgers Business School
• Johanna Schima, Head of the European Delegation, Make Mothers Matter (TBC)
  or
  A Representative from MAV or MothersCan (EU projects that support the recognition and validation of non-formal skills such as those acquired when performing family work)
• Agustina Palmieri, Founder & Director, Mom’s & Co, Spain (an MMM member organisation) – on promoting the ‘Motherhood bonus’
• Riccarda Zezza, Chief Science Officer & Founder, Lifeed, Italy (TBC)
• Sonia Malaspina, Chief People Officer & Corporate Affairs, GLS Italy & President, Winning Women Foundation, Italy
• Emanuela Pozzan, Senior Specialist, Gender Equality and Non-Discrimination, International Labour Organisation (Moderator – TBC)

This event is organised by Make Mothers Matter as a Zoom webinar. It will be held in English with simultaneous interpretation in French and Spanish (TBC).

The 64th session of the UN Commission on Social Development will take place 2-12 February 2026 at the UN headquarters in New York. Priority Theme: Advancing Social Development and Social Justice through Coordinated, Equitable, and Inclusive Policies. 

The Commission will also discuss as an emerging issue Eradicating Poverty and Ensuring Dignity through Resilient Care and Support Systems – a high level panel in which Farah Arabe, MMM main representative to the UN in New York and Board member, will have the honor to speak on 4th February.

See also:

→ MMM written statement to the Commission: Care, the overlooked dimension of social development and justice