Topic: 2024-Unpaid Care and Domestic Work
Country: Germany
Delegate Name: Hunter Sturm
Country: Germany
Committee: UN Women
Topic: Unpaid Care and Domestic Work
Delegate: Hunter Sturm
School: Williamston High School
Around the world, women and girls are facing a crisis. Unpaid domestic work, the jobs people do at home like cleaning, child raising, and cooking are being done by women at an astounding amount compared to men. Based on information from the International Labor Organization, a whopping 76% of unpaid work is performed by women. Put into real money by paying the national minimum wages for that time worked, it would be around 10.8 trillion dollars a year. While this number alone makes this information astonishing, the consequences of women working in these conditions are even worse. Disproportionate gender norms are limiting or even eliminating access for young girls in some areas. A cycle is created, leaving generations of girls working in the same conditions as their mothers before them.
Germany has had its ups and downs when it comes to protecting women’s rights, especially in regards to work. They’ve enshrined into law that “all persons shall be equal before the law”, and that “men and women shall have equal rights”. Both these provisions exist within the German “grundgesetz”, or basic law. This is Germany’s constitution, and was meant to be a placeholder yet has stayed in use since 1949. There have also been federal laws meant to help enforce equal pay between men and women, like the entgelttransparenzgesetz. Yet despite all these protections for paid work, Germany still faces the same issues that other countries do when it comes to unpaid work. Women are still socially expected to maintain the household, performing tasks that aren’t deemed as traditional work. Men are also still looked upon more often as the “breadwinner”, leaving the chores even more up to the women of the household.
In the future, Germany would like to see some improvements to this issue, but would also like to recognize the importance of cultural and societal boundaries. Germany’s past involvements in overarching cultural reforms during World War II have left a lasting impression on the future of their policies. Any solutions, despite the prevalence of the issues at hand, must be able to respect the cultures and societies they are impacting.
