“There’s something deeply sick about the economy,” said Gawain Kripke, the policy director at Oxfam America. “The fact that women around the world are doing so much work that is uncompensated, unrecognized and unsupported is part of the problem.”

On average, women globally spend 4.5 hours of their day on unpaid work while men spend about half that time.

In richer countries, that gap is smaller, but nowhere in the world do men do as much unpaid work as women. In Norway, a country often hailed as a gender equal utopia, women spend about an hour more on unpaid work than men, according to data from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). But in India, women spend almost six hours on unpaid labor and men spend less than an hour.

And those figures might even be an underestimation of the time spent on unpaid work and care because much of the data relies on self-reported time diaries, Kripke said. Women are often doing two things at once — cooking and looking after children, for example. But while cooking might be measured as one hour of labor, the child care element might be categorized as secondary or even unreported entirely, Kripke explained.

Because women tend to earn less than men, they have more of an economic incentive to give up their job and focus on work at home while the higher earner goes to work. But because they have so much to look after at home, they often can’t take on a higher-paid job that might require more commitment, creating a vicious cycle that traps women at the bottom of the economic pyramid, perpetuating the gender pay gap.