Giving Compass' Take:

• News Deeply reports that changes in family structures and lengthening life expectancies will soon result in a care crisis — and women stand to lose the most.

• What can nonprofits do to support paid and unpaid care workers to mitigate this trend? How might restructuring our healthcare system to prioritize the importance of elder care also bring relief and create more gender equity?

• Here's more on why the U.S. must improve its longterm care industry.

The world is facing a crisis in the provision of care in the coming decades, the International Labor Organization (ILO) has warned. In a new report on the future of the global care economy, the authors state that without proper government investment in care services before 2030, gender inequality will increase and economies will suffer.

As populations age, family structures shrink and more women enter the workforce, the demand for care work is set to increase significantly in the next decade — it’s expected that there will be 2.3 billion people needing care by 2030. Lead author Laura Addati says that whether this work is high quality and well remunerated or low quality and exploitative will determine the scale of the crisis.

Addati says government spending on child care, elderly care and early childhood education will have to double by 2030 to avoid a “race to the bottom” on care work. If we continue on current investment trajectories, she says, women will end up taking on more and more unpaid care, leading to higher poverty and a waste of human capital.

“Women will lose their talent and the investment that has been put into educating more women, pushing them to have careers, climbing the ladder and breaking the glass ceiling,” she says.

“It’s all these costs in terms of equality, and in terms of impoverishment.”

Read the full article about the coming crisis in the care industry by Megan Clement at News Deeply.