Ashlea Coen (@ashlea_coen) analyses LinkedIn’s “career break” interaction design and critiques how the language points to the devaluing of caring as a job in society. Ashlea is a researcher focused on the intersection of design, technology and sociology.

LinkedIn has replaced the traditional CV

Since its launch in 2003, LinkedIn has rapidly replaced traditional methods of finding and applying for work. In 2018, 75% of people used the platform to find work while 85% of employers used it to screen applicants.

In 2022, the “career break” feature was released, allowing people to add a career ‘pause’ to their LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn attributes the feature to pandemic-related workforce changes, which disproportionately affected women. The feature is therefore designed predominantly for women, with LinkedIn noting that 68% of women prefer to positively display “career breaks” on their CV and highlight acquired skills.

With this new feature LinkedIn promotes a “career break” as a positive, skill building opportunity. The feature was met with a positive response from media (Washington Post, Forbes) as having the potential to normalise caregiving.

How the term “career break” is both gendered and problematic

*Screenshot of the dictionary definition of “career break” on* *Google*

Results from the LinkedIn research indicate that the term “career break” is gendered. Googling the words “career break” in search of a definition, quickly gets to the heart of how the terminology is problematic. The definition points to gender and indicates that caring isn’t a work activity.

In academic literature, article titles or abstracts that contain “career break” predominately feature studies that investigate the effect of motherhood on women’s careers. Taking a “break” from one's career therefore indicates a transition from work to non-work: caring is framed as a non-work activity. As such, “career break” has implicit gendered connotations that point to how caring is an unpaid and deligitimised skill in society.

The skill of caring is invisible in society, which shapes policy

Care work involves the responsibility for another’s well-being, such as children, elderly parents, or disabled family members.

The framing of care work as a non-work activity is linked to the history of the binary division of labour and exclusion of women from the workplace. Women and men were confined to different domains, the market economy or workplace (male domain) and the home (feminine domain), with the latter including housework and caring for children or other adults.

*Caring work is often undertaken by women. Photo by Dominik Lange on* *Unsplash*

Conceptions of the role of women in society have since matured, with women entering the workforce and the disruption of the nuclear family model. However, historically and today, work within the home — predominately undertaken by women — has not been included as a part of the economy in western countries, as it is an activity that does not produce money.

As a strategy to dismantle the ongoing unequal division of labour in different-sex relationships and the invisible work of the home, feminist scholars have argued for “counting” the economic benefit of the hidden, unpaid labour of women.

Recent examples of “counting” include a PwC report, which calculates that if unpaid childcare had a monetary value, it would be Australia’s largest industry equating to $345 billion dollars, which is three times as large as the financial and insurance sector. When it comes to caring for those with a disability or the elderly, the Government estimates that there are 2.65 million carers in Australia, who work 2.2 billion hours annually, equating to $77.9 billion in unpaid work.

PwC estimates that women work 15 hours of unpaid labour per week (including caring for children, other adults and housework), compared to five hours of work by men. The uneven division of labour occurs regardless of women’s circumstances (education or income). Research into the gender split in domestic work has mainly been conducted in white, cis-gendered male-female/different-sex couples. However, emerging research suggests that the unequal share of unpaid labour changes depending on ethnicity, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people showing more egalitarian patterns of sharing responsibilities. Evidence from the 2016 Census in Australia shows that same-sex couples are more likely to equally share domestic work.

Focusing in on childcare responsibilities, the role of primary carers in Australia is a job mostly taken up by women, with the percentage of stay at home dads hovering around 3-4%. The Human Rights Commission found that those taking parental leave or returning to work—including men—face a range of different types of discrimination, including negative attitudes or missing out on opportunities for advancement. When returning to work after taking time off for caring responsibilities, there is evidence that women are treated as incompetent, substandard employees, who aren’t serious about their careers. Some employers perceive parental leave as a “holiday” or “break”, highlighting how fraught the terminology of a “break” can be, reinforcing negative attitudes towards care work and framing it as a cushy and undemanding task that requires no skill.

Evidence for how we devalue care work also exists within governmental systems in Australian society. ParentsNext, a system that is a part of Services Australia requires that people report their activities in order to claim support payments. When attempting to claim caring for her child and elderly mum as a job, one claimant was rejected. Care work isn’t counted as a job within the design of governmental systems.

*Step one of adding a career break to a LinkedIn profile at* *https://www.linkedin.com/*

Taking a closer look at the “career break” feature
Coming back to the LinkedIn feature, the platform first requires the pressing of a plus button to add a new position or career break to your profile. Here, this design is a subtle reinforcement of the gendered binary division of labour, differentiating work (add position) from non-working activities (add career break).

The next step is to select the “type” of career break from a drop-down menu, and list other details of the break. Sectioning the alphabetical list into different groups highlights that most are periods that still involve one’s career, including career transitions, and professional development. Two of the categories point to a period of personal fulfillment: gap year and travel. Two could be categorised as emotionally turbulent sections of people’s lives: health and bereavement. These categories fit with the traditional definition of the word “break”, as they are transitionary periods between work.

*Step two of adding a career break on a LinkedIn profile*

However, when we re-think the categorisation of caring as work, the two options of caregiving and full-time parenting no longer fit within this drop-down.

Categorising care work as a non-work “transitionary” activity reinforces how roles, predominately taken up by women, and roles that don’t necessarily produce a monetary outcome, are excluded from measurement in our economy and society. Caring for others is a form of work. In fact, there are whole industries—the childcare, disability care and aged care industries—that require qualifications to undertake such work. Similarly, unpaid care work, which is the care work being highlighted here, requires a large range of skills to help a child develop or ensure an adult is cared for.

Categorising care work as a “career break” also suggests that there is an endpoint to caregiving, which is often not the case. For example, a baby grows and transitions from a baby to a toddler and then to a child and teenager. The child still requires care, and the care worker's skills develop as the child develops. Care work is not a transition, rather a permanent position. LinkedIn’s design fails to capture this complexity.

Making care work visible by “counting” unpaid work through interface design

There is an opportunity here—one that LinkedIn has recognised—to make care work visible. However, the current interaction design mirrors the way that care work is framed as non-work activity.

Instead of listing care work together with holidays, or transitionary work periods, it could instead be positioned as an unpaid job to add to ones CV. The current interaction reinforces how care work is seen as a separate domain in our lives, linked to the gendered separation of work and home.

This problem extends beyond LinkedIn: it is an issue with how we frame care work in policy and government. LinkedIn’s design is simply a reproduction of the issue.

Without changing the design of LinkedIn’s product, we can already choose to alter our use of the platform and add care work as a job on our CVs. Although as LinkedIn has recognised, and as touched on in this article, the social stigma attached to care work means that openly stating this on a CV could lead to discrimination.

What are the next steps?

We can alter the way we use social media platforms; and in this instance adding care work to our CV could be a form of digital protest. If enough people added care work as a job on LinkedIn, highlighting the many skills it entails, this could be a catalyst for a shift in attitudes. Doing this could be a way to “count” care work as a job. As argued by Cameron and Gibson-Graham, we need other ways to include unpaid parts of the economy beyond capitalist ways of counting.

However, this is an individual approach. We also need societal approaches to solve this issue, by reframing care work in society as a job. Government and policy decisions could help to create change in this direction.

Designers also have the power to shape interactions on platforms, which can in turn shape the way we understand our own identities. This is just one example of how social norms may be mirrored in the way that we design.

LinkedIn’s “career break” feature highlights how society devalues unpaid care work