LEBANON - The care economy includes the paid and unpaid work involved in caring for people. This covers childcare, care for older persons and persons with disabilities, healthcare and education, as well as domestic work carried out within households.

In Lebanon, care has a strong influence on women's relationship with the labour market. It affects whether women participate in paid employment in the first place, while care-related jobs also make up a significant share of the work undertaken by women who are employed.

A new statistical portrait by Lebanon's Central Administration of Statistics (CAS), based mainly on data from 2018–2019 and supplemented by its 2022 follow-up survey, provides a detailed look at this relationship.

Care and Women's Participation in the Labour Market

Women remain significantly less likely than men to participate in the labour force. Around 70% of women aged 15 and above were outside the labour force in the main 2018–2019 survey, while only around 30% participated. The share actually in employment was approximately 25%, meaning only about one in four women aged 15 and above was employed.

Care and household responsibilities are an important part of this gap.

Among women outside the labour force who wanted to work but were not looking for a job, 32% identified family or household responsibilities as their main reason in both 2018–2019 and 2022. The corresponding figure for men was only 2%.

Household responsibilities were also prominent among women who did not wish to work. In 2022, 65% of these women described household responsibilities as their main activity, compared with 7% of men.

The figures illustrate how caregiving responsibilities can influence women's ability or willingness to participate in paid employment.

Care Is Also a Major Source of Employment

Care is not only unpaid work performed at home. It is also a major part of Lebanon's formal and informal labour market.

In 2018–2019, around 55% of employed women were in care employment, compared with only 7% of employed men. This means an employed woman was nearly eight times as likely as an employed man to work in care employment.

Overall, care employment represented 22% of employment in Lebanon, meaning more than one in five employed people worked in a care-related job.

Women accounted for approximately 77% of the entire care workforce, compared with 23% of men.

By 2022, care still represented a substantial part of women's employment, although its share had fallen to 48%. Care accounted for 18% of total employment, while women represented 67% of the care workforce.

What Counts as Care Employment?

The CAS analysis follows the International Labour Organization's statistical framework and identifies care employment by combining workers' occupations with the sector in which they work.

It divides care employment into four groups: care workers in care sectors, such as teachers and healthcare professionals; domestic workers employed directly by households; care workers employed in non-care sectors; and non-care workers employed in care sectors, such as administrative employees in schools or hospitals.

This distinction is important because people working in the care economy do not necessarily have the same jobs, backgrounds or working conditions.

Teaching and Domestic Work Dominate

In 2018-2019, women's care employment was almost evenly divided between care workers employed in care sectors and domestic workers employed by households.

Care workers in care sectors accounted for 44% of women's care employment, while domestic workers represented 43%. Teaching alone accounted for 28% of all women in care employment.

The composition changed considerably by 2022. Care workers employed in care sectors represented 62% of women's care employment, while domestic workers fell to 16%.

The decline in domestic work occurred during Lebanon's economic and financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, when falling household purchasing power likely reduced the ability of families to employ domestic workers.

Teaching also became more prominent, accounting for 39% of women's care employment in 2022.

Two Groups, Very Different Working Conditions

The women working in these care-related jobs are not a single, uniform group.

Among women working in care occupations within care sectors, 82% had university-level education or higher in 2018–2019. Domestic workers had a very different profile: around 90% had intermediate education or below, and approximately 93% were non-Lebanese women.

Employment conditions also varied sharply.

Around 61% of women in care employment were informally employed in 2018–2019, meaning they did not receive employer-paid social security contributions or basic benefits such as paid annual and sick leave. Among domestic workers, informality reached almost 100%.

Informality also affected other groups, however, including 32% of care workers in care sectors and 33% of non-care workers in care sectors.

By 2022, overall informality among women in care employment had fallen to 51%. However, this decline does not necessarily indicate that working conditions improved across the care economy. Domestic workers, who had the highest rate of informality, had become a much smaller share of women's care employment, while informality increased in some other groups.

Why the Care Economy Matters

The data show that care has a dual role in Lebanon's labour market. Unpaid care and household responsibilities can keep women outside paid employment, while paid care work employs a large share of women who do participate in the labour market.

At the same time, the care workforce includes women with very different educational backgrounds, nationalities and employment conditions.

Understanding these differences is important when examining women's employment in Lebanon. The care economy is not one type of work or one group of workers; it is a broad part of both household life and the labour market.