A child is fed. An older person is washed. A sick relative is watched through the night. Meals are made, clothes cleaned, appointments remembered. This labor creates the conditions in which the rest of economic life can happen.
Much of it vanishes at the boundary of headline economic measurement.
When care is purchased in the market, it can enter measured output. When comparable care is provided unpaid within a household, it generally does not. The work has not changed. Its position relative to the market has.
Time-use surveys and supplementary accounts can measure unpaid care. Conventional measures such as GDP usually exclude it. That omission does not create unequal care burdens by itself, but it helps conceal them. The hours and opportunity costs remain inside households, with women carrying a disproportionate share. The exact scale and distribution vary by place.
GDP was not designed as a complete measure of human worth or social necessity. The fracture appears when its production boundary is mistaken for the boundary of socially necessary work.
Unpaid care is treated as peripheral in the number precisely while society depends on it in practice.