The paid domestic work sector is dramatically increasing in the EU, particularly in Spain. This project addresses three main questions about social inequality through a mixed methodology design that includes documental, survey and interview data. First, this research examines how public policy debates framed the change in this economic sector in relation to issues of gender equality and shifts in immigration across the EU and in Spain. Second, the study investigates the relationship between employing paid domestic workers and the gender division of paid and unpaid work within households. Finally, the project analyzes the societal-level implications of increases in paid domestic work for changes in inequality between families over time. This research seeks to make a theoretical and empirical contribution by connecting the dynamics of pay domestic work sector to changes in the effects of gender, ethnicity and class on stratification and the meaning of social inequality in the EU.
Broader impacts
The escalation of paid domestic work is taking place in different places around the world under similar circumstances. This study provides a framework to understand the implications of this economic sector for the broader structure of inequality, which could be used to contrast with other countries. Current policy debates, especially at the European Union level, legitimate the growth of this economic sector and propose to professionalize and formalize it. This research aims to inform this debate by providing more information about the actual implications of such proposals and making visible some of the ways in which inequalities based on gender, class and ethnicized citizenship may not only be reinforced but also possibly enhanced. This analysis is also crucial to understand the meanings and implications of current policy debates about fertility, migration and women's employment broadly understood. The results may be of interest to policy makers, domestic workers rights' advocates, feminist organizations and other organizations working on related social justice areas.
This project examined the escalation of paid domestic work in Spain, which mostly occurred through international migrant women’s labor, and its effects on the gender division of labor. Based on a framework that situates the market as an integral part of the structure of housework and care relations, the project shows how distinctive combinations of markets, families and public sector produce systematic patterns of political and socioeconomic inequality that intersect gender, class and migration processes. Empirically, this study took a mixed methods approach to the domestic labor sector and combined quantitative analyses of survey data about the distribution of household work with qualitative analyses of interviews and documentary sources about the political interpretation of employing domestic workers for the gender division of labor in Spain. The first analysis addresses the political dimension by looking at how the political representation of paid domestic work changed over time. Pilar Goñalans-Pons compiled parliamentary debate transcripts from 1978 to 2011 and conducted interviews with key political actors. The analyses revealed that the recent expansion of paid domestic work was legitimized by EU and Spanish discourses that linked affluent women’s economic advancement to the availability of domestic workers as substitutes. Centered on native middle class women, this discourse constructed gender equality as a goal that domestic workers contributed to but would not benefit from. Thus, the shift from hiring native to migrant domestic workers changed the meaning of gender equality policy. The second analysis showed how this reliance on paid domestic workers also changed the stratification of Spanish households. First, time-use survey data on the division of housework revealed that households hiring domestic workers used them to replace women’s unpaid work, which increased class differences in the total work done by married partners. Additionally, the availability of paid domestic work was associated with a 33% increase in the time gap between poorer and richer Spanish women in housework time spent. Second, the combination of interview and survey earnings data was used to examine paid work relations for women. Preliminary analyses indicated that hiring domestic workers was a crucial decision that determined professional women’s occupational mobility and earnings accumulation. This process contributed to increasing economic inequality among women and households. Altogether, the results from the study of these three mechanisms illustrate how the growth of the paid domestic work sector in Spain reproduces gender inequalities through a cyclical dynamic, in which the expansion of some women’s opportunities depends on the devaluation of others. The marketization of care and housework services contributes to class and gender polarization among Spanish women, while keeping migrant women marginalized. This tension underlines the persistent intersectional challenge of valuing care and housework labor while also promoting women’s advancement in the labor market.
