The Most Essential Work in the World Is Still the Least Valued
And women are still doing the bulk of it
Oh yes, I’m back from the little break! It was lovely, thank you for asking. Despite the scorching heat sweeping across Europe, I managed to visit some fascinating sites, finally finished a few books that had been gathering dust on my shelf for far too long, spotted a school of at least 100 fish while snorkelling, and ate obscene amounts of pasta.
For the rest of the summer, I plan to publish semi-regularly, taking it easy whenever the heat waves hit us again. And, as always, if you enjoy my work, please consider liking or sharing this post—it helps others discover it —or becoming a paid subscriber, if you can. You can also buy me an iced coffee instead.
Thank you for being here! And I hope that despite everything going on right now, you’re able to take some rest this summer, too.
I never do laundry.
Well, all right — I do laundry sometimes, but mostly only when my partner is away for work. For reasons I still find a bit puzzling, he actually enjoys doing it. I, on the other hand, do not. So it works out perfectly. Beyond all things laundry, he does other chores, too, including washing up, managing our calendars, and regularly stepping in as my sous-chef. Some other tasks, like grocery shopping and gardening, we do together.
Whenever I mention this, in conversation or in my writing, some people don’t quite believe me (including my own mother), while some others find it ‘inspiring’ or ‘exceptional’ that a man would be so involved — in his own house, with his own stuff, for his own well-being. Shocking, I know.
It’s true, though, that even among our peers — people in their late 20s and early 30s — it’s not that common to find heterosexual couples who truly split domestic work fairly. Even those who say they do usually just mean she does most of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, planning, etc., while he takes out the bins, fixes things now and then, and occasionally whips up his ‘signature dish.’ And then there are, of course, those who don’t even pretend to care about domestic equality. I’ve even met guys my age who outright claim that housework is ‘beneath them.’
For men, domestic and care work is still — at best — considered as ‘extra.’ As an optional ‘bonus’ behaviour. Meanwhile, for women, it’s still just baseline. The bare minimum.
The good news is, there’s been some progress in the division of household labour in recent years. The bad news is, it’s slower than one might hope.
According to an NBC News analysis of the latest US time use survey, at the current rate, domestic work might become equal around the year 2066 — in 41 years. If we’re lucky, some of us might even live to see it. But the same survey also shows that American men are now spending a record-high amount of time on household activities — an average of 1.67 hours per day, up from 1.33 hours in 2003, the first year of the survey. In that same year, 63% of men reported doing housework daily, compared with 84% of women. Today, it’s 74% of men and 87% of women.
So yes, men are taking on more domestic responsibilities than before. But women still do the lion’s share. On average, they spend 2.34 hours a day on household tasks — and nearly twice as much time, or more, than men on most of them: housework (like cleaning and laundry), food preparation and clean-up, and household management. And that’s before we even get to care labour, which — surprise, surprise — women also do more of. (The same goes for volunteering, another form of care work, though it appears in a separate category in this survey.)
If you combine domestic and care work, American women perform an average of 3.16 hours of unpaid labour every day. That’s 22 hours a week, or close to 100 hours per month — the equivalent of a part-time job. And even that likely doesn’t capture the whole picture. The cognitive and emotional labour required to manage a household — the planning and organising and reminding and explaining and interpreting others’ emotions and anticipating their needs, etc. — is harder to quantify, but just as real.
But even women in full-time employment average 2.53 hours per day just on domestic and care labour. For women with children, especially young ones, those numbers are even higher. And so is the gender gap. Actually, a Canadian study published last year using data from 1985 onward found that while women’s domestic workload understandably increases during the child-rearing years, men’s… decreases.
In other Western countries, the situation looks fairly similar. In the UK, for example, women spent a daily average of 2.75 hours on housework and another half an hour on care work in 2024, adding up to 3.3 hours a day. For men, the total was 2.2 hours. That’s at least a tiny bit more than their American counterparts. Still, in both countries, the gender gap is actually more pronounced among younger people. Young men don’t seem any more willing to pull their weight at home than older ones, unfortunately.
One recent study using UK data found that even men who work from home don’t take on more housework. And when it’s women working from home, it tends to increase their domestic load instead. Overall, in the majority of heterosexual couples with flexible work arrangements, it was still women who did most of the chores.
Meanwhile, time-use surveys also show that men consistently spend more time on exercise, sports, entertainment, socialising, education, and personal well-being. They also log more hours in paid work, a data point frequently trotted out to justify why they supposedly shouldn’t be expected to shoulder as much of the load at home (as if women’s lower time spent in paid work isn’t, in part, because they’re the ones left doing everything else). But even in households where it’s women who do more hours of paid work or are the primary breadwinners, these unequal arrangements remain. Besides, if you add up the total hours of paid work and unpaid domestic and care work, women still come out doing more.
The unequal split of house chores isn’t due to women simply having more ‘free time’ — it’s due to a deep-rooted entitlement to their labour.
In her 1975 pamphlet Wages Against Housework, scholar Silvia Federici argued that capitalism has always depended on unpaid domestic work done by women. As she points out:
Housework had to be transformed into a natural attribute rather than be recognised as a social contract because from the beginning of capital’s scheme for women this work was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable and even fulfilling activity to make us accept our unwaged work.
In its turn, the unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it (…).
I’d add that it has always relied on cheap domestic and care labour, too.
And the people who’ve done it — past and present — have overwhelmingly been women as well, particularly from marginalised backgrounds. In the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, domestic servants were mostly Black women, as they were shut out of other job opportunities. In Victorian England, especially London, many were Irish immigrants. Those expected to handle everything — maids-of-all-work — were sometimes even called ‘slaveys.’ But regardless of who they were, they’ve consistently been underpaid, undervalued, and largely invisible. Just like many of the women doing this kind of work today.
After all, in a capitalist system designed to produce just a few winners at the top, it makes perfect financial ‘sense’ to devalue the labour it depends on most — and by extension, to devalue the people doing it. And while this logic extends to all sorts of essential, yet low-paid work — agriculture, food service, etc. — it’s housework that underpins it all. Because without someone keeping life running at home, even the most poorly paid job outside of it becomes nearly unsustainable. Not to mention that without all that labour, there would be no one to fill those jobs in the first place.
As Federici puts it:
It is not an accident that most men start thinking of getting married as soon as they get their first job. This is not only because now they can afford it, but because having somebody at home who takes care of you is the only condition not to go crazy after a day spent on an assembly line or at a desk.
It’s then hardly an exaggeration to say that a massive portion of every country’s wealth and stability, as well as the functioning of the global economy, rests precisely on that foundation of unpaid care, domestic, and emotional labour disproportionately done by women and girls. But if all that labour were unpaid no more, well, the economy would look radically different. According to Oxfam, if women were paid minimum wage for the unpaid work they do, it would amount to nearly $11 trillion a year. That’s around 9% of global GDP. And more than three times the size of the global tech industry. Even if women were paid just $10 an hour for their share of domestic work — a rate lower than most nannies or housekeepers — they’d pocket nearly $300 a week.
Another recent study found that if an average stay-at-home parent of two wanted to fully outsource their labour — which was estimated to require a total of 200 hours or nearly nine full days each month — it would cost somewhere between $3,500–$5,000 per month, depending on where they live. Over the course of 20 years (the assumed time of raising one child), that adds up to well over a million dollars. Still, let’s keep in mind that if domestic and care work were fairly compensated — which, like most female-dominated fields, it isn’t — these numbers would be even higher.
But even these rough estimates make it clear that the economic value of unpaid ‘women’s work’ is colossal. And yet, it remains some of the least valued work there is, if not the least. Because if that weren’t the case, domestic and care labour wouldn’t be so frequently dismissed as ‘unskilled’ or ‘not real work.’ It wouldn’t be seen as ‘emasculating’ or somehow ‘beneath’ men. It wouldn’t be largely invisible in official statistics and excluded from social protections , contributing, among other things, to women’s lower pensions. It wouldn’t damage women’s job prospects. And it wouldn’t, time and again, leave them overburdened, unprotected, and economically disadvantaged.
Patriarchy and its handmaidens love to insist there’s nothing more important for a woman than getting her ‘mrs degree’ and taking care of her husband and family. And yet, these same voices are quick to dismiss that labour as ‘real’ work, recoil at the thought of doing it themselves, and fight tooth and nail against providing support to those who actually do it.
And then they wonder why, oh why, more and more women want to do anything but that.
The trouble with domestic and care work isn’t just that it fails to be seen as work — hell, it’s not even seen as a skill. As Federici writes, it’s long been framed instead as ‘a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration supposedly coming from the depth of our female character.’ And if something women do is, supposedly, an ‘innate’ part of our biological make-up, then it conveniently follows that others (men) ‘just can’t do it,’ right?
But there’s no gene that makes men incapable of operating a washing machine or doing housework, I’m afraid.
Besides, the domestic sphere wasn’t even always considered ‘feminine.’ Neither was care work. Even if you go rummaging far back into our past, you’ll find that caregiving was a community affair — not a biologically predetermined function tied to a single gender. Highly cooperative care patterns and alloparental networks — where parental care is also provided by individuals other than biological parents — are still commonly observed among surviving hunter-gatherer communities, like the BaYaka and Bofi of Central Africa, for example.
Long before we figured out how to plough fields or split atoms or stack steel into skyscrapers, we had to figure out how to care for one another. Humans are ridiculously helpless as infants and need many years — longer than any other mammal — to develop into (sort of) independently functioning beings. But even fully grown adults can’t survive entirely on their own.
Care work, and later domestic work, were, and are, the sustaining forces that made all human advancement possible. And despite how it’s often treated, it’s not just ‘women’s work.’ It’s human work. And men are more than capable of doing it, too.
This is also why I find it strange and, quite frankly, counterproductive to treat men who do what women have always been expected to do as somehow ‘exceptional.’ Don’t get me wrong — I do appreciate men who are actively working to unlearn patriarchal conditioning, who don’t opt out of tasks just because they’ve been branded as ‘feminine,’ and who see relationships as partnerships, not as one-directional pipelines of unconditional service, support, and care. Still, taking care of your own home, and your own family, isn’t going above and beyond — it is, or rather should be, the baseline. For everyone. And if we ever want to change the norms, we have to stop treating bare minimum participation as heroic. It’s not.
However, even just this bare minimum — being a present, engaged partner who shares household responsibilities — already leads to better relationships and greater well-being, for both people. And yet, conversations about male loneliness or falling birthrates rarely touch on the obvious: that part of the problem is men doing too little at home, and women doing too much. Because any labour, no matter how meaningful, can become depleting when done relentlessly and without pause, which is why women — especially mothers, or those ‘sandwiched’ between raising children and caring for ageing parents — are more prone to burnout and chronic stress.
On the other hand, though, doing too little of that work can leave us emotionally underdeveloped, relationally detached, and, yes, lonely.
I certainly hope we won’t have to wait until the year 2066 to see household duties finally shared more equitably. But at the current pace, who knows? It might take even longer if we keep clinging to outdated cultural scripts that devalue the very labour that makes everything else possible.
Still, it’s in (almost) everyone’s interest to stop doing that. To stop treating domestic and care work as only a woman’s domain, and start recognising it for what it truly is — an essential skill and a core human activity to be shared across genders, households, and society at large.
Because there really wouldn’t be one without it.
Welcome back, Katie. My husband and I have always done our own laundry. It's worked for us for almost 50 years. We're living proof of the possibility and promise of gender equality.
Household labor inequality isn't just unfair, it's abuse.
Source: Zawn Villines of Liberating Motherhood here on Substack