The Architecture of Absence: Why Europe's Labour Market Rests on What It Refuses to See

In Brief

A recent CEPS analysis argues that the EU's vision of an inclusive labour market remains structurally impossible while unpaid care work, performed overwhelmingly by women, goes unrecognised and unvalued. Six years after the pandemic briefly illuminated the care economy as essential infrastructure, the same inequalities persist: women spend more than 2.5 times as many hours on unpaid care as men, and globally, 708 million women are prevented from labour market participation by these responsibilities. The research points toward a fundamental design flaw in how European economies conceptualise work itself.

The question of who cares, and what that caring costs, will be among the working problems examined at Human x AI Europe in Vienna on May 19, where policy meets practice in real time.

The Pandemic's Brief Revelation

There was a moment, in the spring of 2020, when something became visible that had always been there. Nurses, cleaners, childcare workers, home helpers: suddenly the language shifted. Essential workers. Frontline. The care economy, that vast apparatus of paid and unpaid labour that keeps households, families, and communities functioning, was briefly recognised as infrastructure. Not metaphorically. Actually.

A new analysis from CEPS (Centre for European Policy Studies), published this week during EU Diversity Month, asks what happened to that recognition. The answer is uncomfortable: it faded. The structural inequalities the pandemic exposed remain firmly in place. Women continue to carry the main burden of unpaid care across the EU, particularly in terms of intensity. The numbers have not changed. The discourse has simply moved on.

This is not a policy failure in the conventional sense. It is something closer to a design feature, an architecture of absence built into how European economies measure, value, and organise work.

What the Numbers Actually Show

The statistics deserve attention not because they are surprising, but because their persistence reveals something about what gets naturalised.

According to the CEPS research, women spend more than 2.5 times as many hours a day on unpaid care work than men. Worldwide, unpaid care work prevents 708 million women from participating in the labour market. In the care sector itself, where women represent around 65% of the workforce, the pandemic's recognition of essential work did not translate into lasting structural change.

Research by the OECD across 25 member countries found that between one-third and one-half of all valuable economic activity goes unaccounted for in GDP per capita. At the European level, unpaid family care work has been valued at between 17% and 31.6% of EU GDP, depending on methodology. The International Monetary Fund estimates that women perform on average two more hours of unpaid work per day than men, and that redistributing this burden through policy could generate gains of up to 4% of GDP.

These are not marginal figures. They describe a shadow economy larger than many formal sectors, operating on the assumption that someone, somewhere, will do this work for free.

The Third Shift

The concept of the double shift, women performing paid work and then returning home to unpaid domestic labour, has been part of feminist analysis for decades. But recent research from York University identifies something more insidious: the third shift of cognitive labour.

Cognitive labour refers to the mental work of managing a household: anticipating needs, planning schedules, remembering appointments, coordinating logistics. It is the work of holding the system in one's head. The research found that women, compared to men, reported engaging in a disproportionate amount of cognitive labour, which increased their emotional exhaustion and, in turn, was related to greater turnover intentions and lower career resilience.

What makes cognitive labour particularly difficult to address is its invisibility. It leaves no trace. There is no pile of dishes to point to, no visible evidence of the work performed. As one viral social media discussion put it: Even when it looks like she's just relaxing, reading a book, or having 'me-time,' she's often still thinking, planning, and organizing everyone's day, just to keep the home running smoothly.

This is not a soft observation. It describes a form of labour that drains cognitive resources, reduces capacity for paid work, and remains entirely uncompensated.

Built for Burnout

A companion CEPS analysis from earlier this year challenges the framing of burnout as a women's issue rooted in cultural expectations or internalised perfectionism. The European Working Conditions Survey shows that women have a lower subjective wellbeing score (68.0 vs 70.6) and higher anxiety levels (26% vs 16%) than men. But the explanation is not gender per se. It is job design.

Jobs with low autonomy and high emotional demands are, in the CEPS framing, burnout factories. Women are disproportionately concentrated in precisely these roles. The gender burnout gap is not about women being more prone to exhaustion. It is about the structural characteristics of the work women are channelled into.

This reframing matters for policy. If burnout is understood as a personal failing or a cultural tendency, the response is individual: resilience training, self-care advice, better boundaries. If burnout is understood as a design problem, the response is structural: job redesign, autonomy, redistribution of emotional labour.

The Policy Landscape

COFACE Families Europe, in a statement marking International Women's Day 2026, called for an equal earner, equal carer model across the EU. The European Parliament's November 2025 resolution on the EU Gender Equality Strategy stressed the need for this approach, aiming at a more equal gender balance concerning care responsibilities.

The PATHS2INCLUDE consortium of universities, working under the Horizon Europe programme, has identified a series of necessary interventions: adequate childcare and long-term care services, well-designed and well-paid parental leave, flexible work arrangements, and measures that encourage men's take-up of care responsibilities.

Without such measures, the research concludes, exclusion of women from the labour market will persist in recruitment practices, working-time arrangements, career progression, and work-exit pathways. These disadvantages are reinforced by social norms, insufficient care services, and forms of flexibility that transfer care risks onto women rather than redistributing them.

The Question of Visibility

The term invisible labour was coined by sociologist Arlene Kaplan Daniels in the 1980s. Four decades later, the invisibility persists not because the work is hidden, but because the systems designed to measure economic activity were never built to see it.

Legal scholar Eric Posner argues that invisible work functions as an implicit subsidy to market production, enabling employers to push down wages, often to zero. The cultural understandings that render certain work invisible become, in this analysis, a source of monopsony power.

This is the architecture that the 2026 EU Diversity Month theme, an inclusive labour market for all, must confront. The call for everyone of working age, particularly vulnerable and disadvantaged people, to participate in quality, paid work cannot be answered while the foundation of that market rests on uncompensated labour performed disproportionately by women.

What Gets Naturalised

Stand in front of any policy document about labour market inclusion and notice what is absent. The care economy appears, if at all, as a problem to be solved through services, not as a form of work to be valued in itself. The assumption that someone will do this work, for free, for love, because it is their nature, remains embedded in the design.

The question is not whether care work is essential. The pandemic answered that. The question is whether European labour markets can be redesigned to recognise what they have always depended upon. The answer requires more than policy adjustments. It requires seeing what has been made invisible, and asking who benefits from that invisibility.

The artifact remembers what the discourse forgets. Six years after the pandemic, the care economy remains essential infrastructure, still unbuilt.