The Making of a Business Case for Unpaid Care and Domestic Work in the Global South: New Frontiers of Corporate Social Responsibility?

Abstract

For some decades, feminist scholars have engaged with the new responsibilities that corporations assume to address gender inequalities, often critiquing forms of economic empowerment that ignore the significance of social reproduction. Recently, however, the idea of a business case for unpaid care and domestic work (UCDW) has caught traction, opening up new ways for businesses to showcase responsibilities for gender equality in the Global South. Taking cues from feminist debates on corporate agency for gender equality, this paper examines a three‐year partnership between Oxfam and Unilever's brand Surf, which aimed to recognise, reduce, and redistribute UCDW in the Philippines and Zimbabwe. Based on online material and interviews, we scrutinise how corporate and NGO goals coalesced around a business case for care and the governmental techniques assembled to act upon the problem of UCDW in the Global South. In comparison to the business case for women's economic empowerment we find that, for the corporation, the targeting of the social reproduction of groups of negligible economic interest is more difficult to justify and sustain. However, some of the techniques of governance used during the course of the partnership have been repurposed for political ends, charting different pathways to transform gender unequal responsibilities for social reproduction.