A/HRC/44/51 carried out largely by women. One opportunity presented by this trend is the expansion of jobs in the care sector, which can free up women’s time and provide new employment opportunities. However, there is a danger of entrenching the gender pay gap and structural discrimination unless paid care work is properly valued, with significant investments in decent work conditions. A major risk for women’s rights to work in the context of population ageing is the failure to invest in affordable and high-quality care services. This will limit women’s ability to engage in paid employment as their unpaid caring responsibilities increase with demographic change. 30. Recent decades have also seen increasing numbers of women migrating as workers, a trend that is likely to continue. In particular, there has been a growing demand for migrant domestic and care workers due to complex factors, including the increasing participation of women in paid work in wealthy countries and high-income groups, the demand for cheap care labour and the lack of investment in care services. This has created a phenomenon known as the “global care chain”. There are 11.5 million migrant domestic workers globally and, of these, 73.4 per cent are women. 21 There will likely be an increased demand for migrant domestic and care workers in the context of population ageing. 22 However, migrant workers are often denied human rights, such as access to health care and social protection, in their country of work. Migrant domestic workers are often doubly marginalized, as migrants working in the informal sector, where they exist in precarity with heightened risks of wage theft, violence, harassment and abuse. For migrant domestic and care workers, gender-based discrimination is compounded by further discrimination, among other things, based on their legal status, ethnicity, race, class or caste identities. Migrant domestic and care workers are also vulnerable to human rights violations in their country of origin, for example exploitation by brokers. 31. Rapid urbanization, combined with the growth of urban poverty and the absence of basic infrastructure and services, also has significant implications for women’s work. The lack of decent work opportunities and lack of access to resources, such as land, for women in rural areas often pushes them to migrate to cities in the hope of securing better quality work. However, the lack of decent work opportunities in urban areas often relegates women to precarious and informal work. Furthermore, the growing trend of large-scale urban development and renewal projects encourages an increasing use of evictions, confiscations and demolitions that negatively impact women who work in public spaces or run smallscale enterprises, thereby increasing their economic insecurity. 32. Another aspect of demographic change is the “youth bulge”. In most of sub-Saharan Africa, and in parts of Asia and the Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean, recent reductions in fertility rates have caused the working age population (25–64 years) to grow faster than other age groups, creating the opportunity for a demographic dividend (E/CN.6/2020/3, para. 22). Women’s and girls’ increasing educational attainment is a significant opportunity for increasing young women’s access to work. However, the systematic and patriarchally rooted denial of reproductive autonomy and lack of access to sexual and reproductive health services, along with harmful and discriminatory practices, such as child marriage, continue to hamper young women’s access to education and employment. Even where women’s educational achievements have significantly improved, the transition from school to decent work remains a challenge due to the lack of access to decent work and persistent discriminatory social norms and practices. Accelerated globalization 33. Globalization is characterized by increasing human, financial, economic and technological transactions and communications across countries and regions. Recent decades have seen the rapid growth of globalized neoliberal capitalist economic regimes and structures with the promise of more jobs and growth. However, the reality has been increasing inequality and economic disparity, often at the expense of decent work and the 21 22 8 ILO, A Quantum Leap for Gender Equality. See www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/--dcomm/documents/publication/wcms_534204.pdf.