'Part I of the paper examines the interface and trade-offs between paid and unpaid work, including unpaid care work, while Part II identifies data gaps and proposes further research and analysis. Specifically, the paper focuses on women’s and men’s division of labour between paid work and unpaid care work and its effects on gender equality with respect to decent work outcomes, and one’s ability and power to make and act on choices: its interconnection with individual and family poverty: and on how economic and social policies and institutions influence women’s options by reducing or increasing the burden of unpaid care work. Unpaid care work shapes the ability, duration and types of paid work that can be undertaken. As it does not offer monetary remuneration, it reduces the exercise of “voice” over decision-making and impacts on one’s ability to accumulate savings and assets. Being regarded a woman’s “natural” work - performed in the “private” sphere of the family - unpaid care work hides away its economic dimensions and contributions: and being undervalued, it assigns paid social reproduction (care) workers to jobs that are presumed to be unskilled, with low pay, slender options for promotion and scant social protection. .Most importantly, unpaid care work entails a systemic transfer of hidden subsidies to the rest of the economy that go unrecognized, imposing a systematic time-tax on women throughout their life cycle. These hidden subsidies signal the existence of power relations between men and women. But also, they connect the “private” worlds of households and families with the “public” spheres of markets and the state in exploitative ways. It is important to shed light on these interconnections and draw attention to a pervasive form of inequality, in ways that motivate public dialogue and action on behalf of policy makers, in the hope that change is possible.'