The W20 USA Presidency is asking G20 governments to treat care as economic infrastructure. Its care economy advocacy brief asks members to “increase investment in comprehensive care and support systems to 10% of national income by 2030” and to “reduce the unpaid care gap by 35% by 2035.”
The data behind the request bear directly on labor supply. A joint ILO and OECD report presented to G20 labor ministers in 2025 found that in 2023, “care responsibilities were the main reason why 229 million women in G20 countries remained outside the labour force,” compared with 11 million men. For employers in tight labor markets, that figure describes a large pool of people kept out of paid work by care duties.
The childcare and leave gaps
The report, “Women at Work in G20 countries: Progress and policy action in 2024,” was published July 31, 2025. It looks at whether paid parental leave connects to free early childhood education or school.
Only five countries, Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico and Russia, “appear to provide a continuum” of paid parental leave and universal, free early childhood education. In the remaining G20 countries, the report says, the childcare policy gap “amounts to around four years.”
Leave is also uneven. The average gender gap in paid parental leave across G20 countries was 24 weeks in 2024, with around 27.2 weeks for mothers against 3.3 weeks reserved for fathers. The report says available data suggest women “often do twice as much unpaid domestic and care work as men.” The W20 brief, using a different measure, says women spend 2.24 times more time on unpaid care work than men across the G20.
What the W20 is asking for
The brief is organized under four headings: increase investment in care systems; reduce and redistribute unpaid care; recognize care work through better data, including “regular time-use surveys”; and reward and represent paid care work, with “fair pay, decent working conditions” and social protection for care workers. The brief carries a 2026 copyright held by the iSAW Foundation as custodian for the W20 USA Presidency and does not give a publication date.
The W20 is building on a commitment already on the record. In their Johannesburg declaration of November 2025, G20 leaders wrote: “We further commit to significantly increase investment and social protection in the care economy and adopt measures to address stereotypes.”
Where it stands in 2026
The U.S. G20 presidency’s published priorities center on removing regulatory burdens, affordable and secure energy supply chains, and new technologies. Its four working groups cover growth and deregulation, innovation, energy abundance and trade. Care and gender do not appear among them. G20 leaders meet in Miami on December 14–15, 2026.
For companies, the questions the W20 raises are practical ones: how leave, childcare support and flexible work affect hiring and retention, and whether governments will report comparable data on care that employers can benchmark against.
