Why Women Are Exhausted: The Real Cost of Care in a Society That Doesn't Value It
We are at the start of a new cycle. And this cycle, I am inviting in a focus on care.
What it costs. Who provides it. And why so many of us, especially women, are running on empty.
I want to revisit a conversation I started on this show a while back, because I have more to say. And I understand it more deeply now. Not just intellectually, but in my body, in my nervous system, in the way I have been living these past months.
So let's talk about care.
The Numbers
In June of 2024, the National Partnership for Women and Families released an analysis showing that Americans' unpaid care work, nearly two thirds of which is done by women, is valued at more than one trillion dollars per year.
Each person, on average, spends about 245 hours annually on caregiving. For women specifically, the value of that unpaid labor is 643 billion dollars.
Now when we say women, I think we have to pause and be honest. That word does not represent all women equally. Because Black women, Asian women, trans women, Latinas, they do not all share the same privilege, even if they share a gender identity.
The data shows that Asian women and Latinas spend more time than any other group providing unpaid care. Roughly an hour more per day than average. Asian women collectively provide 3.5 billion hours of unpaid care annually. Latinas provide 8.4 billion hours. The total value of that labor is 55 billion and 133 billion dollars respectively. Black women provide about $4,250 in unpaid care per capita each year. White women, $4,540.
I believe these numbers are telling us something we already feel in our bodies, but do not always have the language for.
As a society, we do not value care.
Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, put it plainly. This data reveals exactly how much we undervalue care, and shows the enormous potential impact of actually compensating women for what they do.
And Katherine Gallagher Robbins from the same organization said something that really landed for me. Caregiving has long been viewed as women's work, and that gap between men's and women's unpaid labor reflects gender stereotypes that harm everyone. It increases women's economic inequality. And it limits men's ability to truly show up as caregivers too.
Why This Matters Beyond the Dollar Amount
Care work is the most essential industry in the world.
It includes looking after children, the elderly, people living with illness and disability. It includes the daily domestic labor of cooking, cleaning, washing, and maintaining a home.
Without someone investing time and energy into these tasks, communities, workplaces, entire economies would stop functioning.
And yet across the globe, 42 percent of women cannot get jobs because they are responsible for all the caregiving, compared to just six percent of men. Eighty percent of the world's 67 million domestic workers are women. Ninety percent of those women do not have access to social security. More than half have no limits on their weekly working hours.
And even when care work is paid, it is often deeply underpaid. Teachers. In home care providers. Childcare workers.
I remember interviewing for a position supporting foster children. The role required home visits, evaluations, traveling across a rural area, supporting not just the child but the foster parents too, emotionally and practically. I was shocked to learn the pay was twenty dollars an hour.
Even at forty hours a week, that is nowhere near enough to cover rent and living expenses in California.
The feminist economist Nancy Folbre argues that care work has been historically undervalued because it was historically provided by women at low or no cost. Our patriarchal systems do not just allow that devaluation. They uphold it. Actively.
A Few Questions to Sit With
Do you see the caregiving you do as valuable?
Do you feel obligated to care for others at the expense of yourself?
Do you find it easier to show up for others than to show up for yourself?
Sit with those. We will come back to them.
What Real Self-Care Actually Means
I feel like I have been on a lifelong exploration of what it truly means to care for myself. And what I thought was self-care for most of my life, it was not actually that.
Growing up, what I remember most being taught about self-care was wake up, wash your face, brush your teeth, get yourself together, look presentable. My mom really emphasized that, and honestly, it stuck. I still have a whole morning ritual that ends with me feeling put together.
But there was so much I was not taught. What foods actually support a female body. What it means to care for my emotional self, my nervous system, the way I relate to myself and others. The inner landscape.
I think a lot of us approach self-care from a pretty surface level. It is about looking good, getting a workout in, maybe eating cleaner when we have time. Our culture does not push us much deeper than that, because our culture is designed around convenience, speed, and getting back to work as fast as possible.
What we often miss is oxytocin.
They do not teach you this in school. Oxytocin is the primary regulator of the female nervous system. For male bodies, the primary regulator tends to be dopamine, that hit of completion, of crossing things off the list. Dopamine matters for all of us. But the misunderstanding is assuming that women's systems are wired the same way.
They are not.
Women need oxytocin. We get it through intimacy, through touch, through connection. Not just any connection. The kind where we truly feel met, seen, reciprocated, and understood. That is a biological need for the female body to thrive and regulate.
And here is the part I find extraordinary. Women were actually the ones who developed this part of the nervous system. The ventral vagal system, our social engagement network. It evolved through mothers caring for their babies. Over generations, the women who came before us literally shaped this part of our biology.
And yet so many of us are not receiving this kind of care. We are not getting the reciprocal connection that truly nourishes us.
We have more technology than ever, and we have higher rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and autoimmune disorders, especially among women.
This is not our fault. This is what happens when a society programs women to override their biological needs. To keep giving. To keep showing up for everyone else. To believe that doing it at the expense of yourself is something to be celebrated.
The Medical System Isn't Helping
I am currently on what I have started calling a wild goose chase through the Western medical system. I have been exploring symptoms for over six months now. Not a single clear answer from doctors yet. In one appointment, a woman doctor told me there was nothing she could offer me through the lens of Western medicine, and referred me to a telehealth service.
I know there are beautiful, innovative practices emerging. We have had Dana Culp on this show, who specializes in menopause and women in midlife. I am grateful those spaces exist.
But the mainstream system was not built to get to root causes. It was built to treat symptoms.
I believe this too is a reflection of a patriarchal system that fundamentally does not take women's health seriously. We are conditioned to look outside ourselves for answers, and then told those answers do not exist.
The other piece that is missing is mental health care that is actually built for women. Almost every woman who comes to work with me has already tried talk therapy. It did not fail because she is broken. It is because those systems were never designed with her full biology and lived experience in mind.
Your rage, your frustration, your anxiety, your depression, these are not problems to be fixed. They are wise, valid, healthy responses to living in a system that asks women to make themselves small, silence themselves, override their body's signals, and keep giving.
There is nothing wrong with you. Your nervous system is responding appropriately to an oppressive system. That is actually intelligence.
What I Could Do Differently
So where do we go from here?
I have been on my own journey of learning what it truly means to care for myself, not just on the surface, but at the level of my nervous system, my relationships, my patterns, my body's cyclical rhythms. That is what I am bringing more and more into the work I do with women, because this is the gap. We know how to care for others. We do not always know how to receive care ourselves.
If your daughters are watching you, if there are young women in your life, what they learn about self-care, they learn from watching you. That is the ripple. Not just what is happening now, but the path we are laying for the women who come after us.
A Closing Invitation
Before I let you go, I want to come back to those questions.
Do you see the caregiving you do as valuable?
Do you feel obligated to care for others at the expense of yourself?
Do you find it easier to care for others than to care for yourself?
Sit with those. Really sit with them.
If something in this stirred something in you, if you are ready to explore what it actually looks like to receive the right kind of care, to have a plan that honors your whole self, your nervous system, your cycle, your life, then I have a next step for you.
You can book a Somatic Assessment and Care Planning Session with me. This is a one-on-one session where we look at what is going on with you, what your goals are, what your body is asking for, and we create a care plan specific to you. Book Here
I would love to sit with you.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for caring, for others and, I hope, for yourself too. 🌹