Nothing about the chaos that began in Kabul fifteen days ago, when Taliban forces first entered the city, has been good news for Afghanistan’s women and girls. Claims by the Taliban that their orders for women to stay home are temporary, until their fighters “are trained to respect them,” ring hollow, and are widely seen by women there as an excuse to reimpose Sharia law. (The Taliban gave similar “temporary” orders—that never expired—when they controlled the country from 1996 to 2001.) Any promises of moderation seem unlikely to be true.

What does it mean for a country when half its population is excluded from full participation? Outside of Afghanistan, women left the workforce in disproportionately large numbers last year as the COVID-19 pandemic began, and millions of them won’t be back any time soon. “Roughly five million women still can’t work due to child-care issues,” said U.S. vice president Kamala Harris in May. Today we’re exploring how everyone benefits from their participation—and why women don’t earn as much as they should.

In this issue:

• Benevolent sexism
• Unpaid labor
• Women in Afghanistan
• A conversation with Maryam Gardisi and Inge Missmahl

Most of us think of sexism as something that tells women that they’re less than: that they can’t compete in the boardroom, or in serious negotiations; that they’re not better drivers or better at spatial skills when in fact men aren’t necessarily better at those things, either. But sexism can be “benevolent” as well. Melissa Hogenboom, author of The Motherhood Complex (and contributor to our Concrete Love gathering in Lisbon this fall), explained to us what “benevolent sexism” means:

Benevolent sexism is when you suggest that women have certain vulnerabilities or personality traits that make them better carers, which sounds like a compliment, but isn’t. It’s like oh, well, women are naturally more empathetic, they’re better homemakers, or women are more caring, so more likely to take care of everyone else. It diminishes a woman’s voice at the table. And it’s just not true

Women aren’t as different from men as we like to think. Much of what appears to be biological differences are in fact learned behaviors. While there is evidence that infant boys and girls will prefer trucks or dolls, respectively, widespread beliefs about who is biologically better suited to care work are unsubstantiated. “Women become more competent or caring because they’re expected to do so literally from birth,” Hogenboom told us. This can be hugely detrimental to their income. “Research shows that some women go into careers where they know the hours will be more flexible or more amenable to family life later on.” These careers, not surprisingly, are almost always lower paid.

Care work

Then there’s the work that isn’t paid at all. Women across the globe perform unpaid care work at a rate up to ten times the number of hours put in by men, according to a report by the OECD. “The day-to-day lives of women around the world share one important characteristic: unpaid care work is seen as a female responsibility.”

What would the world look like without women’s unpaid contributions? Without the cooking, cleaning, childcare, eldercare, and care for the disabled, without the transportation, shopping, and myriad other ways that women support others without being paid? One day in Iceland in 1975—known afterward as the “long Friday”—90 percent of women in the country went on strike. “It brought the whole nation to a standstill. Men across the country scrambled to fill in, taking their children to work and overwhelming restaurants,” write Gus Wezerek and Kristen R. Ghodsee in the New York Times. According to an analysis by Oxfam, Wezerek and Ghodsee go on to explain, women’s unpaid work around the world would add up to U.S. $10.9 trillion if they were paid for it. “It exceeds the combined revenue of the 50 largest companies on last year’s Fortune Global 500 list, including Walmart, Apple and Amazon.”

The value of their work is staggering, but even a number in the trillions still falls short: It’s impossible to quantify the toll that care work takes on women who perform it. As Kate Washington writes in Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America—quoted in Anne Helen Petersen’s must-read on eldercare last week in Vox—“Burnout kills empathy and makes worse caregivers of all of us who suffer from it.” In a recent report by Insider, 68 percent of women versus 55 percent of men reported feeling burned out during the pandemic. In countries where social safety nets are weak—where childcare is unaffordable and eldercare requires navigating a byzantine patchwork of services and fees—the work, and the burnout, disproportionately falls on women.

Women in Afghanistan

One of the worst places in the world to be a woman is Afghanistan, where an estimated two-thirds of girls do not attend school. That number is not likely to increase now that the Taliban has taken over the country. Denied their right to an education, women there are increasingly forced to work informally, stuck between a need to feed their families and a near-total ban on their ability to do so. So they take laundry, perform odd jobs that they can manage to do entirely within their homes, and work in the opium-production trade.

The OECD has concluded that the informal economy comprises as much as 80 percent of overall Afghan economic activity, meaning that official growth estimates are of only limited utility: A report by the United States Institute of Peace has found that half of Afghan women in female-headed households are sewing, embroidering, or washing laundry for others. As one Afghan participant put it, “economic activity is critical to the empowerment of women, especially in Afghanistan, where women are confined to the four walls of the house,” and where weak, broken, corrupt institutions make it critical to allow women to build businesses at home.

With the U.S. invasion in 2001, opium production reached new highs. Last year the pandemic pushed more women and children into the poppy-lancing process, though the exact numbers and impact of this shift do not show up in national accounts.