the social value and time burden of womens unpaid work is essentially ignored and there is no real commitment to promoting gender equality in the distribution of that work daly however the result for growth ultimately depends on the gender distribution of social reproduction if a state is successful in using social and labour market policies to push an economy into or maintain in the case of changing structures of production a wageled regime growth may still be elusive if the provision of care is constrained by the time squeeze associated with a more traditional gender division of labour maintaining such a division between women and men with the consequence that womens labour market attachment is more limited may help protect the production of human capacities but at the cost of constraining women s contributions to market production and lower overall economic growth