7 Moral Desert, Rawls’s Justice as Fairness, and the Gendered Division of Labor Cynthia A. Stark The gendered division of labor as it exists in liberal democracies 1 is unjust. By gendered division of labor (GDL), I mean the social arrangement wherein women provide a disproportionate amount of unpaid domestic care work, relative to men, regardless of whether they also labor outside of the home (Folbre 2008, 107–108; Gornick and Meyers 2009, 3–16; Robeyns 2012, 164–168; Hirschmann 2016, 658; Watson and Hartley 2018, 189–191). By care work I mean the meeting of the needs of one person by another person where face- to-face interaction between carer and cared for is a crucial element of the overall activity and where the need is of such a nature that it cannot possibly be met by the person in need herself. (Bubeck 1995, 127) Care work, as I am understanding it, then, involves caring for depend- ents. 2 The GDL is unjust because it is contrary to the following principle of reciprocity, which serves as a minimum criterion of distributive justice: those who contribute to a scheme of social cooperation are owed a ftting share of the social product (Rawls 1996, 16–17; Rawls 2001a, 6, 49). Those providing care work in current actual arrangements are not given an appropriate share of the social product: their work is exten- sive, demanding, and vital to society, yet they receive no income of their own for their work, they must forgo opportunities for paid work, and their work is often invisible and, when visible, not prestigious (Bryson 2007, 43); indeed, their work is sometimes seen as not work at all but rather as leisure or an activity that cannot be work because it is its own reward (White 2003, 109–110; Folbre 2008, 99–101). The work of car- ers is not confned to shifts but rather takes place day and night, week- days and weekends, including when families are on holiday from the breadwinner(s)’s paid work. Further, care workers often must relinquish the social power and infuence that accompanies prestigious work and they have insufcient social support (in the way of, e.g., parental leave or government/employer subsidized child and elder care) to allow them Bhandary, A., & Baehr, A. R. (Eds.). (2020). Caring for liberalism : Dependency and liberal political theory. Taylor & Francis Group. Created from utah on 2023-03-18 14:11:33. Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.