Here is a number that should stop us cold.
$10.9 trillion. That is the estimated annual value of unpaid care work performed globally, according to Oxfam’s 2020 Time to Care report. That’s more than three times the size of the global tech industry.
And 76% of it is done by women.
We tend to file that fact under “inequality.” We rarely file it under “expertise.”
But consider what that work actually requires.
The World Health Organization has spent decades documenting something called community health worker knowledge — the informal, hyper-local epidemiological judgment that determines which water source is safe this month, which symptoms mean “wait” and which mean “walk to the clinic now.” That is not intuition. That is real-time risk assessment, refined by repetition, under conditions with no formal training and no margin for error.
A 2017 study in the Journal of Development Economics found that women managing household resources in low-income settings made allocation decisions with efficiency metrics comparable to trained microfinance officers — except without the training, the software, or the salary.
McKinsey’s “Power of Parity” research went further: it found that advancing women’s equality in work could add $12 trillion to global GDP by 2025. The report’s quieter finding is more interesting. Much of that projected gain wasn’t from teaching women new skills. It was from recognizing skills already in use and moving them into paid, formal, powerful spaces.
That is the pattern I keep seeing at She Builds Power. We don’t arrive to install competence. We arrive to relocate it.
The counterargument, and where it’s right
Here is the objection I take seriously, because it’s a fair one: doesn’t romanticizing care work risk trapping women in it further? If we tell a woman that hauling water for ten years made her a “systems thinker,” aren’t we just dressing up an unjust burden in flattering language — and asking her to carry more of it, now with a compliment attached?
That danger is real. UN Women has warned explicitly against “care-washing” — celebrating unpaid labor rhetorically while doing nothing to redistribute it. Recognition without redistribution is just a nicer cage.
So the claim here isn’t “care work is beautiful, carry on.” It’s narrower and, I think, sturdier: the cognitive and managerial skill built inside care work is real, transferable, and chronically undervalued — and naming that is a precondition for moving women out of unpaid care and into paid leadership, not a substitute for it.
The second objection: is this just survivorship bias — a few remarkable women, generalized into a theory? Possibly. But it’s worth noting that formal leadership pipelines already run on exactly this kind of pattern-recognition. Harvard Business School research on “credential inflation” has shown that employers routinely use job titles and degrees as proxies for skills that people frequently already possess without them. We accept the proxy for a Wharton grad without blinking. We rarely extend the same benefit of the doubt to a woman who has run a household economy for fifteen years.
Where this leaves training
None of this argues against formal training. Engineering still requires engineering. Finance still requires finance. A woman who has managed a household budget under scarcity still needs to learn accounting standards, construction codes, loan structures.
But there’s a difference between training that assumes a blank slate and training that assumes prior expertise waiting to be formalized. The former takes longer, meets more resistance, and produces less durable results — because it is, in a quiet way, insulting. The latter moves faster, because it isn’t teaching a skill from zero. It’s giving an existing skill a new vocabulary, a new credential, a new room to stand in.
That’s the difference between arriving with a framework and arriving with recognition.
Maybe care is not the opposite of power.
Maybe it’s the unaccredited version of it — and the work in front of us is not to invent leadership in women who’ve never had it, but to stop pretending it wasn’t there all along.
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