The debate around the upcoming referendum raises issues around the foundational values that guide society and policy, writes Dr Pauline Cullen of the Department of Sociology.

    On International Women’s Day in Ireland, there will be two referendums -- on recognising and supporting diverse families, and valuing care in women’s and men’s lives.

    Key to these is changing Article 41.2 of the Irish constitution, following recommendations from a Citizens’ Assembly in 2021 and the Oireachtas Committee on Gender Equality last year. The referendum proposes replacing 1937 text defining a woman’s life and duties in the home as her primary role with a gender-neutral framing of care.  
     
    European elections are also on the horizon, as are elections across the globe, in an unprecedented year of contests that some view as consequential for how humanity responds to a range of crises. While debates in Ireland on constitutional change have become contested, with many lamenting the lost opportunity for a braver and more consequential rewording, such deliberation does raise issues around the foundational values that guide society and policy.

    They also highlight the weight of history in restricting women’s social roles and political agency. Care and representation are important frameworks to make sense of how women and men are differentially capacitated to participate in private and public life, and in broader terms how we can constitute a capacious and careful politics and policy response to the future challenges we face. 
     
    What we know is that many women in Europe still feel the practical impact of historical and contemporary inequality in their lives, experienced through time, pay and pension gaps associated with gendered care penalties. 92% of women within the EU are regular carers and 81% are daily carers. In contrast, men are at 68% and 48% respectively. In Ireland, women do twice as much unpaid care and housework as men, and  continue to be underrepresented in political decision making as Ireland ranks 103rd  in the world in measures of gender parity  in parliament with women holding 23.1% of  seats in the lower house or Dáil. 

    This unbalanced profile in care and representation has implications for women’s lives. Their absence from decision-making means that their interests can be overlooked in political debates that include better resourcing of social care infrastructure, without which many women are at risk of poverty, stress and unfulfilled potential.

    Care also lies at the heart of intersecting discriminations as unequal responsibility for low-paid care work is shouldered by minoritised people. Careful societies, where care is valued and representation is diverse, are also more equal and offer a bulwark against the erosion of democracy and social cohesion.

    In my research on care work and gender and politics and in my role as a national and international gender expert, I explore the factors that maintain inequalities in care and representation. I map how ideas about gender and race inform understandings about who should care and who should lead, ideas that maintain the underrepresentation of women in all their diversity in political decision-making and the undervaluation of female-dominated and increasingly-racialised care labour.  In research that examined the discursive politics of debate on home care, a range of interests were identified as seeking to define it as largely a product to be purchased and or a public good.

    Contests over home care reform revealed a set of wider epistemic struggles to establish expertise on who the ideal care worker is and what constitutes good care. Taking an ideational approach to care policy and politics illustrated how care actors work to shape a broader care imaginary that may challenge or maintain low social and economic supports for care, low political voice for those in receipt of care as well as poor working conditions and low pay for carers.  

    While many women are foreclosed from a political career due to care responsibilities that reflect gender stereotypes and social norms, unavailability of resources and the threat of violence and harassment, sexism and racism amplify these barriers for minoritised women interested in a political role. Minoritised women experience intersecting discriminations and are also grossly underrepresented in political office.

    In the first in-depth qualitative research on minoritised women’s access to and experience of politics, I highlighted traditions of careful leadership enacted by minoritised women in support of communities that seed distinctive forms of political socialisation and political ambition that often go unrecognised by the formal political system. In sustaining and caring for marginalised families and communities, such women leaders have experiential proximity to underrepresented experiences that enable them to introduce neglected issues and new ideas to political systems. Yet they experience significant obstacles to candidacy for political office.

    A prolific and complex scholarship on the politics of care has established that as an ethic, care does more than require mutual respect, responsibility, and obligation between individuals. It is also a recognition of the political importance of caring.  As we contemplate the choices available in the upcoming referendums and other planned and anticipated electoral contests, research on care and representation reveals the contemporary realities of care and political inequalities and the possibilities for a more diverse and careful politics to facilitate more equal and sustainable communal futures.