A collective reflection on International Women's Day 2025 on the invisible weight of care work

This 8th of  March, on International Women's Day, we would like to shed light on a central issue in the solidarity sector which is not talked about enough: the invisible weight of care work.

Distributing basic necessities to people on the move, even if it does not solve the humanitarian gaps for which national and international authorities are responsible and are failing to fulfill, is an act of care. Listening to and collecting testimony of systemic violence and deprivation of human dignity at the borders of fortress Europe are acts of care. Re-humanising people on the move whose humanity is denied daily by European and national policies that criminalise freedom of movement, is an act of care. 

In a sector composed of majority non-males, it is essential to re-appropriate the concept of care from a feminist perspective: to understand care as a principle and an indivisible practice of a community based on solidarity, reciprocity, inter-dependence and intersectionality. At Collective Aid, this is reflected in our own team composition, with women comprising 71% of our team.  Despite this, decision-making structures and leadership roles in the wider humanitarian field remain disproportionately male-dominated, highlighting the ongoing need to challenge and transform existing gender hierarchies within our work. Ultimately, we must strive for a concept that ceases to be gendered and that does not take for granted that these responsibilities should be the prerogative of the female gender, but that questions gender roles by aiming at the equal sharing of responsibilities. Care that transcends borders must also transcend conceptions of gender: it is a universal ideal, and not an expectation to be placed on women only. 

It is imperative to acknowledge the overlapping layers of discrimination faced by migrant and non-white women. Solidarity organisations struggle to move beyond the theoretical critique and implement meaningful inclusive policies. To our collective detriment we remain homogeneously “white” for the most part. 

We can’t forget that care work in Western countries is predominantly performed by migrant women, marked as low income and often neglected by social and labour rights policies. Such ‘feminisation’ and ‘racialisation’ of care work are necessary in order to understand not only what happens eventually “at the end” of a long migration journey, but also why the majority of people on the move who access our services are men. Women either tend to stay in their countries of origin, taking care of their families and communities, or face additional and dangerous challenges in their migratory paths, due to being women. These challenges include - but are not limited to - systematic exposure togender-based violence, such as rape and sexual trafficking; sexual violence and exploitation is not an exceptional risk but an almost routine part of the journey for many women, with lack of access to reproductive healthcare threatening and marginalising their lives further. The bodies of migrant women become sites of bargaining and coercion, where surviving violence is predicated on enduring it, consent and autonomy are removed, and the structural normalisation of the abuse they are forced to endure reinforces their invisibility within their own narratives.

This March 8, our call is to re-claim spaces of care free from prescribed gender roles, helping to build supportive communities standing for the freedom to move and be. 

In Solidarity,

Aziza 

Sara 

Isabel

Poppy

Lucy

Rea

Irina

Lydia

Samantha