How Much Unpaid Domestic Labour (Mostly Done by Women) Is Actually Worth
And why it’s important that we talk about it
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Mainstream economics and politics still largely ignore unpaid (and mostly female) domestic labour.
It’s not included in calculating GDP (even though several other forms of unpaid work are). It’s not visible in any other official figures. It’s often not included in social protection programs or taken into consideration in discussions about the challenges women face in paid employment.
To some, it’s not even ‘real’ work.
After all, powerful social norms still regard housework as part of ‘women’s duties,’ which must mean it’s pleasant, fulfilling and oh-so-easy! (Yet it’s not easy enough for men, as we so often hear.)
Although women increasingly participate in the labour market — in some countries, the gender employment gap almost doesn’t exist anymore — we continue to shoulder most of the responsibility for unpaid domestic and care labour. That’s the case even when both men and women work full-time. Even when women are the primary breadwinners. And even when men are… unemployed.
Women do it all, and we’re expected to continue doing it all without as much as an acknowledgement that, yes, this is work. And it can be challenging, exhausting and time-consuming — particularly when you have kids.
But perhaps putting a number on the value of all the labour required to keep our homes and lives running smoothly might help to put things in perspective. And luckily, a recent study did just that.
According to Oxfam estimates, if women were paid minimum wage for all the unpaid care and domestic labour they perform, this would contribute nearly $11 trillion to the global economy a year. That’s around 9% of global GDP. And more than three times the size of the global tech industry.
Another previous study estimated that even if women in the US were compensated at just $10 an hour for their share of domestic labour — which is below the average hourly rates for a nanny or a housekeeper — they’d pocket nearly $300 a week.
Journalist Amy Westervelt even created an ‘Invisible Labor Calculator’ using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to allow women to see how much their labour might be worth depending on how many hours they spend every week performing various household chores. The estimate Westervelt got was $44,249 per year, which is around $850 a week. But when the writer and author Angela Garbes tried the calculator, the number it gave her was…. $300,000.
However, no previous study went into as much detail and in so many countries as the recent one by Beike Biotechnology, which investigated the price of outsourcing household and childcare tasks in 80 cities around the world, including New York, San Franciso, Los Angeles, London, Dubai, Zurich, Seoul, and Rome, to name a few.
The value of the workload, which was assumed to be taken on entirely by one stay-at-home parent, was found by analysing eight common chores and quantifying the time spent on each per month and depending on the number of children in the household.
An average stay-at-home parent of two children, for instance, spends:
19.9 hours cleaning per month
14.3 hours shopping
23.7 hours cooking
11.8 hours doing laundry
84.1 hours on psychological and emotional care
16.8 hours transporting children
7.3 hours tutoring them
and 22.9 hours planning, organising and doing other household administration tasks.
That’s a total of 200 hours.
And nearly nine full days of work every month.
An average stay-at-home parent of four, however, does nearly 300 hours of domestic and care labour monthly, assuming there are often synergies when looking after multiple children. (To put things in perspective, a 9–5 job translates to around 160 hours of work a month. That’s half the amount needed to care for a family with four children.)
Researchers then estimated the overall cost of outsourcing these tasks to various external providers — including a nanny, a cleaning person, and a tutor — in different cities around the world and arrived at the real-world ‘value’ of stay-at-home parents. In the ten cities where they were found to have the most monetary value, the total monthly cost ranges from $5,800 in Zurich, Switzerland, to $4,200 in Helsinki, Finland.
Among the six American cities included in the study, San Francisco was ranked at №3, where the outsourced cost was estimated at $5,200, Washington DC was ranked №7 ($4,450), New York City was №8 ($4,400), and Los Angeles came in ninth ($4,300). Among the cities in the UK, London was, unsurprisingly, the most expensive and the monthly cost was calculated to be $4,000.
Over the course of 20 years, which the study assumed would take to raise one child, all that household workload was worth well over a… million dollars.
These estimates are likely unsurprising to many people with kids, especially if they’ve previously outsourced some of their housework or childcare to paid professionals. But they probably are surprising to those who think domestic labour is neither ‘real’ nor ‘hard’ work.
Well, as the study by Beike Biotechnology and many others show, it does take a tremendous amount of time and, what follows, energy, mental resources, and physical effort to run a household and take care of a family. Even more so if you factor in the hermeneutic labour, which the study above didn’t include, and that refers to all the cognitive work required to maintain healthy relationships — including with your partner and kids.
And because it’s still women who are expected to carry this load in heterosexual relationships, often on top of their full-time jobs — hence the term ‘second shift’ coined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild — this results in, or exacerbates, a number of gender inequalities.
For one, it leads to a gender exhaustion or rest gap. As one report in the UK found, women have significantly less leisure time than men because ‘when not in leisure, women were more likely to be performing unpaid work.’ This also causes a gender hobby gap, as women simply don’t have as much free time to engage in hobbies as men and might even put women at a higher risk of experiencing burnout and stress, with some studies suggesting we’re 32% more likely to experience it than men.
But doing all of this unpaid yet immensely valuable and necessary domestic work also seriously impacts our careers and finances.
Since it’s women who are usually expected to ‘do it all,’ they are much more likely to request flexible working arrangements or switch to working part-time. However, the more a woman adapts her career to family commitments, and the longer this accommodation goes on, the wider the gap between his and her salary and career potential becomes. And so it becomes increasingly rational to sacrifice her, and then that gap only gets wider and wider and wider.
It’s then no wonder that when women retire, they have significantly less money in their retirement savings. A recent study by the Pensions Policy Institute in the UK found that women would need to work for an extra 19 years to retire with the same pension savings as men. In the US, new research by the Alliance for Lifetime Income finds that women who are now entering retirement face far more financial risks than their male counterparts. And while the median retirement savings for men reaching 65 by 2030 is $269,000, it’s just $185,000 for women.
Across OECD countries, that difference in retirement income between men and women averages 26%.
Stay-at-home mothers who gave up their careers when starting families or never worked to begin with — which is nowhere near as common as it used to be, though — can often find themselves in an even worse predicament. After all, full-time caregiving means no income, no social security or national insurance credit, and no financial cushion to fall back on should anything happen. That is unless you made appropriate arrangements to protect your financial future in case of divorce or a spouse’s death.
Still, numerous studies have shown that the economic costs of divorce fall more heavily on women, leaving many of them financially disadvantaged and vulnerable and even exposing them to a high risk of poverty and homelessness.
The brutal truth is that women pay a high price for taking on the majority of the unpaid domestic labour in the form of physical and mental well-being issues, lost career opportunities, lower savings and retirement income and even lower stability, security and safety.
In the meantime, society continues to benefit enormously from all that free labour.
In one of her more recent books, Caliban and the Witch, Italian scholar and activist Silvia Federici writes:
For capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations — the promise of freedom vs. the reality of widespread coercion, and the promise of prosperity vs. the reality of widespread penury — by denigrating the ‘nature’ of those it exploits: women, colonial subjects, the descendants of African slaves, the immigrants displaced by globalisation.
Capitalism relies on, and has always relied on, free and cheap domestic labour. However, for that labour to stay free and cheap, it has to be undervalued and largely excluded from economic measures of ‘productivity.’
But patriarchy purposefully devalues that labour, too. Otherwise, housework wouldn’t be considered ‘emasculating’, and being told to ‘go back to the kitchen’ wouldn’t be used as a demeaning insult meant to remind women of their ‘rightful’ place in society, would it?
‘Traditional’ gender roles might be considered ‘complementarian’ and equal but in a some-roles-are-more-equal-than-others sort of way. One can guarantee (relative) stability and security. The other might get you a pat on the back if you’re lucky, and if you aren’t, mostly just contempt from society.
This then also leads to the devaluation of the paid domestic and care labour sector, which continues to be underpaid and unprotected. After all, it’s not ‘real’ work. ‘Anyone can do it.’ And it’s not ‘that hard.’ (And yet people working in social and health care are at a particularly high risk of occupational injuries from violent attacks, by the way.)
But unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like we’ll turn things around quickly, as progress towards gender equality in the home has been glacial.
The most obvious solution is for men to start doing their fair share around the house without women having to point out what needs to be done, which is a form of labour as well. But how can that happen while some men still think domestic labour is ‘emasculating’ and ‘beneath’ them? Clearly, we also need to change the narrative around housework and acknowledge the real worth and impact of all that labour. And that it is, in fact, labour with as much social dignity and economic importance as work outside the home.
Still, apart from changing social norms, we need policy change, too. Even more egalitarian households are struggling today as survival is becoming increasingly harder and more expensive.
Shorter workweeks, universal free high-quality childcare, and comprehensive paid caregiver leave—for both women and men—are urgently needed to build a world where people don’t have to overwork themselves to death just to barely get by and take care of their families.
But also, where women are no longer expected to sacrifice their well-being, security, hopes and dreams at the altar of patriarchal domesticity.
Gloria Steinem once said, ‘women will never be equal outside the home until men are equal inside the home.’
The personal is political, after all.
But the good news is that our social arrangements are historically and socially produced. The notion of ‘housework’ only appeared at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when men stopped being as involved in domestic life as they were before.
Whatever we have going on now can be disrupted, challenged, and changed. And it definitely should be when we recognise how unfair it is.
I’ve been screaming about this all my life. It’s exasperating! We now commonly pay big bucks for things like daycare, elder care, prepared foods and house cleaning— all things women did traditionally that were never valued. It’s not valued until it’s paid for.
Not only is it a mental toll, but it plays a huge physical toll on the body as well which is unfortunately noticed all too late.
An aunt of mine works the same hours as her husband, yet it is she who wakes up every morning to make a meal for the kids for when they get back home from school, she who socializes with HIS family when they come over (he'll scroll on the phone the whole time), she who tutors, she who shops, etc etc. With all this work, her knees have gotten so weak she walks with a great deal of pain. And the worst part is that even with all this work, it's what she doesn't do that gets focused on by her in-laws.
It's so infuriating and sad that stories like these are more common than one may think, yet I have come to the terms that the older generation won't change. The best thing to do is focus on the younger generation of kids, and just as we have been taught in school to look both ways before crossing the road, kids can be taught chores are for everyone and everyone must do their share.