So now pathetic Americans think others should pay them to LIVE their lives? Good grief, the victim classes are now everyone. OMG, I have to dress myself without pay? Clean my mess without pay? Care for my pets without pay? Feed my children without pay?
You can't make up this nonsense worse than reality.
12
Are child-bearing and birth included? Heck, 'labor' IS included your title.
1
If men are as horrible as this article says, why do women marry them?
5
The artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles has been addressing this issue brilliantly in her work for decades. Check it out. https://youtu.be/WIhf3UBNTlA
1
yeah, an insidious form of slavery
1
Everything is about money in America! Just wait until this virus shows you people just how much your money is worth!
1
Another totally illogical essay.
Who is supposed to make these payments? Other working mothers?
5
I created billthepatriarchy.com so that anyone can calculate their unpaid labor - domestic, reproductive and emotional labor all take a huge toll on our ability to reach our full earning potential. It’s almost as if there is some invisible system benefiting white men which really needs us to not figure this out and keep working for free? Weird!
17
Nice graphics. Weak journalism.
The intent of the 1975 Icelandic women's strike was to get equal pay at work. It was not to get paid for house work or be included in GDP.
Unfair work load at home or lack of gratitude is something for the couple to negotiate, not for the government. Yes, it is important to discuss social norms of what is a fair a share of house work but placing price on it is not constructive.
Income and pension earned belong to the entire family, not just to the person who earns the money. Imagine living in a family where every act done for one another is negotiated and monetized.
Oh wait, this is what the 'shared' service economy is all about. What in the past, you or your loved did for you or with you, you will get on-demand via an app. GDP will go through the roof as we all start servicing each other for a fee.
2
It was nice to see Andrew Yang talk about that so much during his campaign.
5
If you want society to pay for you to raise children, you'll need to apply for the job first. Let me tell you the job:
I'm not paying you minimum wage. Your only rewards are the emotional and biological rewards of procreation and parenthood. I don't feel strongly enough about your kids to pay you to have them. On balance, I'd probably prefer it if you didn't (depends who you are).
Take it or leave it. And please don't come whining to me about the low pay later. You knew what the job was going in. Families pay to raise kids because families love and care for their children. If you want society to pay, ask society before you have them; on behalf of society, "No thanks".
6
Unpaid? What are free rent, medical care, clothing, food, entertainment, etc., except payment? And a woman draws her husband's S.S. Retirement pay after he dies.
What is wrong with the thinking powers of an ideologue? I don't know, but this article displays it in abundance.
7
Now do the math for unpaid emotional and cognitive labor performed by women. If you don't know what it is, look it up.
3
The headline totals the lost wages of unpaid labor by women...won't be fair, to sum up, the total living expenses of these women and find how it got paid while they were working for free or lesser?? This kind of article is more sexist than pro-feminist!!
I am a woman and feminist, and I don't ever think women calculate lost wages when we are pregnant or taking care of our loved ones...because we do that out of love.
The ones among us who have the true potential and fire never give up being their careers for motherhood and count lost wages (like the writers of this article) ..and no I am not talking about Jennifer Lopez...
I am talking about women doing regular 9-5 jobs and balancing their career and families...E.G.the New York Times COO Meredith Levien and CIO Cindy Taiby ..both of them are loving mom's and true leaders and worth their salts in everything they do...
The focus of journalism should be encouraging women to realize their true potential of how to find balance in life and work ..not to make them feel helpless and cheated because they choose family over career..
1
I'm glad my mom cared enough about me that she didn't demand a check to tuck me in at night.
6
How much unpaid work do men do?
2
Ok, the women go on trip, no stress, Range Rovers. Enough said. Oh, and the au pairs.
People want to be paid for work they do in their OWN house and for their OWN children, relatives, and spouses?
Ridiculous.
4
just because you don't get monetary remuneration for tasks performed at home, doesn't mean that you are "unpaid"
you do laundry--- you have clean clothes
you vacuum the floor---your house looks tidy
you clean the toilet-----your bathroom is more sanitary
you cook dinner--- you have food to eat
these tasks are done by members of family/social groups
as part and parcel of the groups daily survival and not with the expectation of financial reward
these "unpaid" tasks have been part of the human condition for ever in fact even before our evolution witness the social activity in primate groups
the need to put a dollar value on every thing that we do is, i think ,a 20th century conceit that is misguided and inappropriate
5
Shouldn’t the headline be modified to read something like “stay at home spouse” rather than “women”?
1
Reminds me of a dumb, but revealing, old joke about Mother's Day--(Husband says to his wife,) "Honey, why are you doing housework today? Relax, it's Mother's Day--leave it 'til tomorrow..."
Only in the last tiny increment of human history have we worried about linking anyone's commitment to do what needs to be done to a paycheck. Before we decided to domesticate grain and animals, humans worked for the survival of the family, the band, the tribe. Now that we sophisticated moderns can even bother to calculate what those hours of effort are worth paycheck-wise in the age of misinformation and individual feelings valued above truth, is yet another marker on the road to doom.
1
A lot of men factor into this category too. So the figure for total unpaid may be much higher. Andrew Yang pointed it out with adult caregivers caring for family members, as one example. We find unpaid altruism everywhere as well as exploitation of labor.
1
This is the real wage gap. We've been blaming employers for a societal problem. Time to fix it.
1
Yes, and so if it is unpaid, who is to pay it? Whether it's paid or not is irrelevant, because it happens in the context of private family arrangements, to be negotiated among spouses and family members.
2
My spouse and I cohabitate and do our own unpaid labor. I haven’t had a meal cooked by anyone but myself for the past 10 years, mainly because her mother lives with us and she prefers momma’s cooking, while I don’t. I do the home maintenance. She breaks things.
I'm not following this. I'm a single 50-year-old man. I do my own shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc. I'm doing these things for my own benefit. Why would someone pay me for doing work for myself? (The situation would be different if I was doing all these things, and also working outside the home, and my partner was doing nothing).
4
Stay at home mothers consistently state that they prefer taking care of the kids and managing the home to working an out-of-home job. The benefits they get are control over the family and the home.
If you ask most women if they want to split everything 50-50 with their husbands the great majority will say no.
That suggests that women's work in the home is self-fulfilling and a matter of choice. In other words, the majority of women prefer that their husbands bring home the bacon so that they can pursue their preferred lifestyle. And the question is how much you get paid for doing what you want to do rather then getting a job like your husband.
2
"Countries with robust welfare programs have higher gender parity."
Well when you have outrageously high income tax rates for those welfare programs, and there's not much left in a paycheck, the wife has to work, like it or not.
And I believe many moms would love less gender parity if they could afford not to work. Gender parity does not necessarily equal happiness. Yes, admit it or not, there are millions of women would love to stay home,raise their kids, and perhaps work time so they can be home when the school bus arrives.
From a 2nd wave feminist: We vastly undervalued women's work, both in terms of time demands and economic value. We encouraged women to enter the workplace and compete with men on men's terms. But those terms rested on the assumption that a wife was home, keeping house and looking after children. We thought we could just pay others to do that work for us, then discovered just how much of our paychecks got turned over to childcare workers, cleaning services, and take-out meals. We also discovered, to our chagrin, that we (like traditional dads) were missing out on our children's childhoods.
What if instead we had insisted that the work women traditionally did was so important that men had to take up half of it when we entered the workforce, and that the workday had to end at 3 pm rather than 5 to give us time to do it all? What a different world it would be today.
7
Somehow the idea, that women should now be paid for all the work they do around the house, and keeping care of relatives is a grand idea. However, we are already in debt from overpromised entitlements by Congress. They have promised over $30 trillion over the next 30 years, that they have no way to pay for, including Medicaid, Medicare, Veterans, Social Security, etc. No, no one paid into those programs enough to sustain their benefits for decades. People my mother's age who are nearing 100, and those over the age of 90 probably paid in less during their lifetime, than 1 month of benefits they are now receiving. I mean, females were born a gender that has periods, can get pregnant, nurse, etc., and late in life they go into menopause. Should we be paid for all of that? I understand that work is valuable, and as someone who stayed home, and raised my own children, as there wasn't daycare when I had my two children, nor did my mother live close by, as she was over 1000 miles out west, I always thought that one was responsible for the choices they made, for better or worse. The truth is, few have it all, even if they earn a lot, have no trouble paying for live in help, daycare, babysitters, etc. There are only so many hours in the day, and to try to burn the candle at both ends, won't make for a good marriage, happy children, or even being happy in one's career. It is the day and age of," driving around in my little black SUV." I work hard at the simple life. No SUV!
1
As a man who left work and stayed home to raise our children (mutually agreed upon), I was later ridiculed during the divorce for "not working" by a millionaire wife and her attorney (also female).
Disparity in power and wealth displays are not necessarily tied to gender.
4
Does the data account for the fact that women work fewer paid hours than men in aggregate? It would make sense then that women would work more unpaid hours.
Also, i'm not sure what we're supposed to do with this information. Should my wife and I "charge" each other for the things we do around the house?
8
I am at a loss. It a service is not paid in money, then the sum is easy to calculate: zero.
Like love, however, some values cannot be measured in dollars. So why try?
3
Divorce laws are changing to make this problem even worse. Women are not compensated at all for the time they spend taking care of children, not one penny, just expected to juggle work and presumed to have the same earning capacity as the man who doesn't do anything for his kids. It's outrageous! I am happy to see some attention paid to this issue.
5
I've just realised what is really wrong about the Oxfam study: the assumption that domestic work is truly "unpaid".
Workers who are unmarried and have no children, keep 100% of their after-tax pay to use as they please. Married workers with stay-at-home spouses and children must allocate part (usually a large part) of their pay to the living expenses -- food, education, clothes, medical care, entertainment, vacations, etc -- of their spouse and children, resulting in much lower net-earnings.
Using the corollary: Oxfam should deduct the value stay-at-home spouses receive in terms of housing, food, etc and half the value of the children's living expenses (assuming children's costs should be shared 50/50) from the imputed value of the "unpaid work" to come up with the true "unpaid" value of the stay-at-home spouse's efforts. I assume the analysis would result in a much less headline-grabbing figure.
9
I am surprised at the wrath of the comments! I for one am happy to see my unpaid work receive attention. I never expected it to be paid, but I didn't expect it to be so much and so invisible. Putting a $$ amount on it, in America, makes it visible. Once it's visible, it has to be considered. Once it receives consideration, perhaps we finally move to supporting families through our culture and our government. Right now this is largely a women's issue. The solutions would benefit everyone.
158
@Glinda
Do you work?
If not, who pays the bills?
If you do work, and your significant other works, do both of you perform "unpaid work" to maintain your household?
Do you do significantly more of this unpaid work than your significant other? If so, you are not getting the attention you deserve. If not, I don't know what the issue is.
10
@Glinda
You get to the point in the second last sentence: you expect the government to pay you for the work you do within your own family unit, presumably based upon your self-reported hours worked. But... we all live in family units of varying size and type, even unmarried singles have the household duties of their solo family unit and apartment.
If there is more than one member in the family unit, then all the members of the family unit can determine how much unpaid work needs to be done and which family members should do it. If the husband pushes the wife to do the bulk of the work, then the wife has a husband problem, not a government or economic problem.
A stay-at-home spouse is paid for his/her domestic labor. If the couple divorce, they split the family assets. If they stay married, the stay-at-home spouse gets the same food, shelter, medical care as the working spouse.
2
Unpaid work in the home also means no retirement plan for later. There's no Social Security for women who work in the home for their entire lives, cleaning, cooking, raising the kids, providing nursing care, educating kids, transporting everyone, administering the household, and being the at-home sex-workers, all rolled into one.
The traditional role of women is to be the social safety net and that role is not valued by the social safety net even one penny.
It's time for a Long Friday here in the US and globally. One day off out of 14,600 days straight of work (365daysx24hoursx40years) seems due.
403
@Alive and Well I worked and I do get social security now in my retirement years. In my early 70's I also transport and provide daycare for my grandkids. I do all the cooking, grocery shopping, housework and laundry for our home. I care for my 90+ year old mother taking her to appointments and church. I did the same for my mother-in-law. In turn my husband does the maintenance on our home, he paints, cleans out old stuff as we downsize, takes care of the yard and snow plows our long driveway. My point is it doesn't end when you get older. As long as you are physically able you continue to do unpaid work.
76
@Alive and Well This is an excellent point. The value of SS over 30 of retirement is significant,
17
@Alive and Well incorrect....there is Social Security for unpaid labor in the home...it's called a spousal benefit...and it's worth half of the higher wage earner spouse, plus on the death of the higher wage earner the higher benefit goes to the lower (or zero) wage earner...a pretty good deal, especially if that person never contributes to SS at all...I worked until I was 70 to maximize my SS benefits...my wife is a bit younger, still working and just started collecting her SS...if she had not worked at all she would be eligible for half of my FRA benefits...she will likely live 20 years longer than me, and when I die she will begin to receive my benefits...we've always shared many household chores (though she was more involved with the kids when they were little)...I am now retired and doing most of the household chores...people do whatever works...
50
To the *many* of you commenting (especially those beginning with "my wife ___" - ahem) that do not seem to grasp what this information means, please read Caroline Criado Perez's book "Invisible Women". She discusses "unpaid labor" in excellent detail, and the catastrophic impacts on women - which by the way, means: catastrophic impacts on society as a whole because women are half the world's population. Lest everyone forget, when women suffer, everyone suffers.
109
@JKV Shall we also not forget that American women suffer less than most other women, and MUCH less than a lot of them, yet my guess is they complain more than women in any other country?In fact, I'll expand that to include Americans in general.
I can't believe claiming victimhood has become such a badge of honor in our society when it actually exposes a pathetic lack of dignity.
8
@JKV Adding the book to my Goodreads list now. Thanks
2
@Rich You would be wrong in that assumption. It's the kind of thing though one expects from someone who totally misses the point of the article. It is about dignity. And respect and getting some.
10
I don't have a wife. Don't ever plan on getting married. So why should I have to handle all the domestic duties myself AND pay someone else to clean their own home? That's insane.
9
Eleven trillion dollars? But that's only for one year's worth of labor by American women. Why only one year? Why only American women? Do the full math! Tell the whole story!
2
To all the women who toil for their families - my hat is off for you!
You work very hard and do a lot of stuff that we, men won't or can't... Buuuut :)) this article is not a basis for compensation demands no matter how right, which it's not, it is... We all doing things for our families that need to be done... and getting into precise calcs who's doing more or earning more will not bring peace and love into family... I could cook and do dishes (in DW)... but other than grilling meats my cooking won't amount to much and no one will eat... My wife's signature soups and other various dishes are delicious and she loves when we'll down them in one seating... and she's a professional who works full time... Should I start cooking (not!) or hire professional chef... or just have a normal family where we balance all the work the best we can without bogus calcs of who done what and what it worth to the family... :))
2
This is the most ridiculous assumption ever. A contrived waste of time.
8
Should we add the cost of having sex?
6
@Rob very underrated comment.
Ex -Democratic candidate Andrew Yang clearly understood the value of unpaid work by women of this country and spoke about it all the time but still not enough people could understand his vision to compensate them for all the work.
4
Thank you for validating what I’ve thought for some thirty years.
5
Could this OpEd be any more sexist...the implication being that 'women's labor' = anything to do with the household, children, eldercare, etc? Plenty of men do such work, but they are held out to be the exception, and women the norm. But how much of this is driven by sexist advertising (i.e., the hand holding the toilet bowl brush is always Female?) and by women themselves buying into and perpetuating such stereotypes, 'complaining' all the while?
Let's stop talking about this as 'women's work', and instead in terms of 'work inside the home' (i.e., work for which no one is outright paying you), vs 'work outside the home' (and where someone is paying you for the work)?
Also, is it really about the money (whether one is paid for the work or not), or is it about how society perceives the two different groups and the work they do? If a couple decides that one of them will work outside the home (and gets all the benefits of the other person creating a nice home, family life, meals, etc.) and the other person handles all the household details (and in return, gets a nice roof over their head, groceries, vacation, etc.), I don't see a problem.
It's not whether folks are getting paid or not, but how society views folks who work outside the home vs within. And if some women don't like that it's typically they doing the work within the home, then they need to effect change instead of simply 'complaining'. Are women (esp in the US?) being forced to do this against their will??
6
@Lisa
In my mind, this is the best of the 100 or so responses I've read. Let's move beyond the binary! Otherwise, we weaponize domestic work and scrub any pleasure out of keeping our houses clean and making food that sustains us. As a teacher, I am grading essays most nights, and I welcome the productive distraction of washing the dishes, or cleaning the windows, or getting the dust off the mantle, or chopping the wood. It's meditative and relaxing, and It's a pleasure to provide for my family. I might be a man; I might be a woman. Does it matter?
In couples that both work outside the home they share about equal amounts of housework. In homes with stay at home women, men still work full time and have to do yet more unpaid work when they get home. That OECD chart is absolute nonsense.
And a roof over their head, food, clothes, etc. that men provide them with??? I didn't realize those are all free.
5
This is much too low. The real amount is closer to $30,000,000,000,000. Without that, capitalism would not work.
2
Trying to cash-value shared domestic arrangements doesn't work, and it misses the real point, which is fairness. Here is a real-world illustration how this is a fool's errand.
Childless marriage. Good financial place, based on my salary alone. Solid upper-middle.
I was willing to use a checkbook for all drudgery - we both enjoy cooking as recreational, and ate out frequently also, so that doesn't count.
My wife worked throughout, but local part-time, and at lower salary - she voluntarily chose to walk away from conservatively $50k/yr. She wanted extra me-time now. But - She chose to do those cleaning and errand chores on her own with some of her extra time.
Because she voluntarily chose to forego her additional earning power, I needed to work 5 years past our original jointly planned retirement date to make sure our retirement was safely financed.
Should I assess the value of those 5 years against her "domestic debt?" How about the 35 years of having to commute 4 hours/day to be able to finance our joint life?
Where is the bank that I can convert those 15,000 extra hours I spent assuring our shared livelihood into a cash value? What exchange rate?
Living has hard, unpleasant things in the ante. Trying to PV and FV it is futile, because partners value things differently. Instead, try just being fairer, share the load when you can - and recognize the value your partner brings to your relationship. If you need to keep spreadsheet score, the problem is elsewhere.
9
I believe that figure is supposed to be attributed as "each" not collectively.
Yes, I am serious.
Be careful what you wish for: One way to look at this is that there is a whole lot of production on which the worker, who is also the beneficiary of that production, pays no income taxes, no social security taxes, etc. Other workers who perform the exact same services, but for the benefit of someone other than themselves and receive a wage or other benefit in return, such as pay or room and lodging, ARE legally required to pay taxes on their production.
For such unpaid workers who keep the benefit of their labor, this makes it seem possibly fair that, in a case of a 25% tax rate, for example, such workers should have to prepare food for some other family for one hour for each three hours that they spend preparing food for their own family. Wouldn’t that be more fair, by treating them more similarly to others?
2
I suspect that figure is less than what it costs men to enable women to stay at home and provide those services. I notice that the cost of gifts and entertainment and extravagances beyond the bare necessities such as Mercedes instead of Toyotas or mansions instead of mobile homes.
Men do it for love of the women and family-- and don't really count the costs until the marriage goes bad and results in divorce.
7
@wahoo1003 Oh spare me how lucky women are to do the labor so that the big man can buy them a Mercedes routine.
You wouldn't be able to buy any sort of car if you had to actually pay for that kind of work. That is the point.
The whole premise turns on the definition of "labor."
I'm not an economist, but to me labor is when you provide goods or services to someone which in no way benefits you, and you are therefor compensated with money. Without the money, you would not do the job.
Children are not a social benefit, like a well maintained roadway. It does not help me in any way if my neighbors have more children. In fact the world is dangerously overpopulated. Having a family is a choice; you make this choice because you have a strong drive to love and nurture children, to propagate your genetic line.
The premise of this article is that child rearing is a necessary task which someone must do, a parent or nanny, similar to maintaining the roads, or growing food. It's nonsense. Suppose I choose to restore old cars as a hobby, and spend many hours a week of hard "labor" doing it. Should I get paid for the hours worked?
6
@A Doctor
1) That is not actually the definition of labor for an economist.
2) It is in fact more to your benefit to have people have children than a new roadway since you will need doctors, lawyers, road maintenance professionals etc. as you get old. That only happens by creating children and rearing them. Child rearing costs money, labor and time. Like anything else.
1
According to this article, "Women's Unpaid Labor is Worth $10 trillion."
But what does that mean?
It seems to imagine that there is some market on which we could exchange the activity of women for other things, like hamburgers at McDonalds.
But that seems to be a fallacy. And it is a fallacy which seems to be shared by some of the presidential candidates, Sanders and Warren.
Sanders and Warren imagine that we could confiscate the wealth of the billionaires and turn it into health care for the poor.
In a free market economy, individuals can do things that society cannot do as a whole.
The painting Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci recently sold for $450 million. That means that the seller might have exchanged the proceeds for 450 million dollar hamburgers at McDonalds.
But society as a whole cannot transform the paintings of billionaires into hamburgers. There's not enough beef. And transforming the painting itself into hamburgers is something like changing base metals into gold. Although many people tried, including Sir Isaac Newton, the attempts never succeeded.
This is part of the reason that macroeconomic is much harder than microeconomics, and subject to fallacious reasoning. And why economists failed to predict the Great Recession of 2008.
There are too many variables and too many tempting analogies that turn out false.
Our value system needs to go beyond dollars. The goods that dollars buy might be important, but dollars is not an adequate measure.
2
Unpaid "labor" indeed. I see this as the current generation bringing this into the conversation, as they expects "paid" for everything they do. Especially those who stay home to spoil their kid(s).
We all have choices, make them, when things do not turn out the way you expect or envision, suck it up. I have.
5
wonderful spin.
my mother and my wife are lovely people, and they are not paid for keeping up the house nor for the children they raised.
They do get free room and board though and a much better lifestyle than they would have ever ever imagined if they had simply had to live on the wages afforded by their skill set and education. Does free room and board as well as paid travel vacations also have a value?
Sorry, but I'm yawning and smirking at the leaps of logic in the article.
14
@Joe Game I think you've got a strange set of what their money is worth if you think that. If you looked at what you have to pay to get someone like them, it would be very high and they would live a very nice lifestyle indeed.
Plenty of us out there supporting not only our families but local schools, sports organizations, and non-profits. When I decided to quit my 15 year career in the financial services sector to become a "stay at home" parent, not only did I manage the household, drive kids to various after school activities, cook and clean, but I was also volunteered as: a Girl Scouts leader (7 years), library helper at my children's schools (5 years), parent teacher organization "fun lunch" coordinator (5 years), room parent (4 years), travel soccer team manager (5 years), and served on 2 boards of local non-profit charitable organizations. All unpaid. Youngest goes off to college in the fall and I am still volunteering in the community at the local public library, at the high school, and with 2 local animal rescues. Thinking about getting back into the paid workforce though...
3
@TC Fischer Also grateful to my husband, who not only was the "breadwinner" but an amazing helpmate and incredible father to our children.
3
The methodology of the study, especially with regard to the US and other "developed" countries is flawed, as "Oxfam multiplied the number of women above the age of 15 by the hours per year the average person spent on unpaid labor." With the exception of child care-givers, most women and men do not begin to do "unpaid labor" until they have families -- currently around age 27 in the US.
More importantly -- what is counted as "work". If a parent (male or female) comes home and devotes an hour to playing or reading with children, is that "unpaid work"? If a parent (male or female) devotes a weekend morning to coaching a child's Little League team or timing races in a swim meet, is that "unpaid work"? If a parent bakes a birthday cake and hosts a birthday party for a child, is that "unpaid work"? If a parent takes a child for vaccinations, is that "unpaid work"? Or is the study classifying as "work" many things that most of us do -- or enjoyed having done when we were young -- as part of normal, loving family life? Isn't there a danger that in assigning a monetary value to the activities that are part of life, rather than part of economic production, we lose the heart of what life is, or should be.
2
@LD They don't wash dishes, do their laundry or cooking, vaccuum the floor or do any necessary shopping until the age of 27? Are so many twens still living at their parents or do I simply misunderstand the concept of unpaid labour? I'm already wondering about how to pay myself for preparing myself a meal now.
1
@Gray Goods Precisely my point! Of course they probably do their laundry and wash dishes and cook, etc but as its for themselves presumably it is not "unpaid work" -- otherwise we'd get into a very odd analysis of calling everything anyone does for themselves (mow the lawn, sew a hem, shop for food, change a lightbulb, iron a shirt....) "unpaid work". Presumably, the authors of the study meant to call "unpaid work" those things we do for others (presumably others we care about) so presumably that sort of "work" begins only when one has a family (setting aside elder care which can be a responsibility at any age).
2
This is an overly facile analysis. As no doubt many commenters have stated, at least in the US, men work an average of 14 more hours per week. Add in the disparity in the unpaid work to keep a household going, and we have parity in the number of hours each spouse contributes to all the work of a household (paid and unpaid work).
5
If you want to argue that domestic relationships between men and women require compensation, there is an existing (and long-standing) business model. The terms of exchange and expectations of performance are also clearer to both sides.
Otherwise, this is a "pay me for living" argument. Sorry, no soap here. There is no way to arrive at a fair price, because for many of the domestic chores, some would do them, some would pay others to have them done, while others would forego - think of, say, dusting under the bed. Or caring for an elderly relative of some means.
If gardening makes you happy, please have at it. But I could care less, and I wouldn't pay a cent for it. What's the equitable valuation there?
6
Surely this is no surprise to women or even to many men. I always did at least half the housework and most of the child care, even when I had a full time job and attended graduate school part-time. Later as a single mother, I did most of it, though my sons were old enough to help somewhat.
It's worth emphasizing that the countries with the most safety nets for families also have men doing the most work at home, even though less than women. That would be enough to convince me to add safety net programs in this country.
5
And, in other calculations, if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a streetcar.
8
@Observer With 40 passengers on average and a fare of 3 dollars, she could earn a whopping 960 bucks during an 8 hour shift of 60 minutes roundtravels. Now you finally know what your grandma's worth!
/ironic
Remember, those in charge of the world would have all of us work for nothing if they could get away with it! Owners can never pay us too little or want to offer us less-than-nothing.
Worse yet, it's in our human nature to believe no one "works" hard enough or as hard as we do. But most of the wealthiest people in the world haven't worked an honest day in their lives.
3
Let's not forget that Andrew Yang ran on this issue. His proposal to provide every American with a universal basic income was meant to recognise the unpaid labor taken on by mothers and caretakers.
5
I'm sceptical of such calculations, because they often ignore the value of housing, food, clothing etc. A person who is employed by someone else and receiving a salary would have to pay those expenses out of pocket. And still care for him/herself, too. Furthermore, in the case where one partner is employed and the other caring for the household, all savings and values are owned together and will be divided in case of a divorce. So, effectively, the stay-at-home person earns half the income of the employed partner. That this often won't amount to at least a minimum wage is a sad consequence of the high inequality in today's economic system. I'm afraid this won't change when people vote for "more of the same" politicians time and again.
2
@Gray Goods You miss something important in your analysis: most women are also in the workforce. That means that women go to work, then come home and do a disproportionate amount of household tasks.
2
@Kristina You're right, these are the real exploitative situations and many families suffer under this, especially the mothers, but the kids, too. It's sad that this has become so common since the 50s, when often a single income could well provide for four people. In a rich country, life shouldn't be so hard for those with low incomes.
Then why don't they charge for it?
If all women just went on a general strike, they would get pay equity immediately.
3
Live alone. See how you like that.
4
What a silly premise and a silly argument.
Close to half of all households are single people - who pays them? Some mysterious government agency.
I choose to vacuum once a week - you choose to vacuum twice - you get 'paid' twice as much?
Families / women have a choice - hire a housekeeper to clean or do it yourself - just like single folks - you 'pay' a professional or you 'pay yourself to do the same task - there is no mysterious third party.
Getting 'paid' assumes a market of goods and service providers and willing customers - this 'unpaid market' has neither - hence i9t is unpaid - just like my stamp collecting 'hobby'.
btw... how much do I get 'paid' for writing this comment - the Grey Lady can expect an invoice soon.
9
As a 63 year old woman, is this really news? Is there a purpose to bringing this up? This will not change. We can't even get anyone other than old white men to vote for. Get real.
7
This article raises a crucial point which will become more obvious as the Baby Boomers and Gen X age and fewer of them have either family members able and willing to provide care for free or the funds to pay out of pocket for others to do it. Sooner or later, something has to give. Either wages need to rise so people can pay caregivers privately, paid time off has to increase so families can do it, or taxes have to rise significantly so the government can pay for it via Medicare/Medicaid. No matter how you slice it, unpaid caregivers have been giving corporations a huge subsidy by making their low taxes and wages possible. One little example: I cared for my grandmother at home for 10 years as she went blind, deaf, incontinent, lost her mobility, and lost her speech. She was only in hospice care for the last 3 weeks of her life. If she had spent those years in a nursing home, it would have cost upwards of $1 million. (On Long Island, nursing homes can easily charge $10,000 a month). Her home and savings could have offset at most $400,000, which would have left the government, via Medicaid, paying $600,000 for her care. Now multiply that by millions of people.
2
@Nikki : that is why MEDICAID -- NOT the US military!!! -- is THE biggest expense of the Federal budget every year.
While a lot goes to the indigent poor, most of it goes to pay for nursing home care for seniors who have outlived all their income & assets.
However, the care is third rate and only the lowest ranked nursing homes accept Medicaid.
So your choice was "let the government pay for substandard care" OR "do it yourself".
I am sure you cared for your grandmother out of love -- I would have done the same, had mine not died when I was 19.
But are you saying the government should force people to care for their elderly relatives with dementia? because that simply won't work -- most people lack the time or skills to do this.
What complete garbage. I guess all the shopping, caring, cleaning and cooking I have done for my family for 30 years doesn't count.
6
Time for reparations! All women, and all descendants of women, should be compensated.
7
If only there was a candidate in the U.S. who wanted to acknowledge and reward the unpaid work that women do via a universal basic income. Work that our current system effectively values at $0.
If only such a radical candidate existed.
1
Nonsense, plain and simple. UTTER nonsense.
8
The entire methodology behind this piece is flawed. The fact that Iceland was "brought ... to a standstill" by women going on strike is supposed to support the estimation of the "true economic value" of their work at minimum wage. But how does this make any sense at all? Daily life is governed by certain arrangements. If, in an unusual situation, somebody deviates from such an arrangement, and it has an economic impact, does that license an inference to the "true economic value" of their contribution? (Say that Michael Bloomberg is taking the bus to work, the bus driver goes on strike, and as a result Bloomberg is an hour late and misses making $5 million. Does that mean that the true economic value of the bus driver's work in that hour was $5 million?)
This piece substitutes a big number for an argument.
5
what's your point?
4
I remember my mother; she stayed at home and did the housework. She rarely got up before 11... had lunch on the table for me when I got home (I'd made my own breakfast) - talked for a good hour at least to her sisters on the phone,then did the rest of the chores and managed to have dinner on the table in the evenings. I remember wishing that I could be a woman too so I could stay at home - where at least I would be my own boss instead of having to put up with someone telling me what to do all day. If you feel like going to the gym instead of dusting - you go!
Later, as a teacher, I sometimes gave private group lessons. 90% of my students were invariably women. Why? Because once their children were of school age that meant that they had tons of time to spend in the afternoons meeting each other, taking courses, joining book clubs, the gym, or simply staying at home reading. Why? Because their husbands were the ones doing 10 hour days (including the commute).
In other words, yes, SOME women work damn hard, doing a 'real' job before getting home and doing another. But so do men, especially when they are single. Children are a choice one makes. There is no reason why people like me - who are single - and already pay high taxes which already pay for schools - should also be paying to let these women have THEIR dreams on MY back.
4
What I have learned from this, I am a Canadian man who works full time and does as much unpaid labour as a Mexican woman.
3
I know quite a few men who have worked extremely hard all their lives and died early. Whatever money they made supported the households, paid for the kids' toys, projects, adventures, cars, educations, weddings, etc. Those who didn't die early got their few joys out of spoiling the grandkids. They took very little for their own enjoyment over the years, nearly everything was sacrificed or put away as nest eggs so as not be a burden to their kids and to provide inheritances for them.
They did not paint themselves as victims or wallow in pity parties.
Hillary called many of them "Deplorables". The Media often refer to them "uneducated" and "racists" and "ignorant" if they voted for Trump. Elizabeth Warren said they don't deserve reimbursement for tuition if they paid for it.
Men are usually the ones who get sent into wars and conflicts and come home with missing limbs. Some women faced this too, but not nearly to the degree as men have.
There's a saying in the business world: you don't get what you're worth, you get what you negotiate.
8
And how much is men's unpaid work worth?
5
Can someone explain why this was published under the "opinion" section? These are just the facts, and a fine analysis of them by the authors. Statistics showing the gender inequality deeply embedded in our societies are not "opinion", they are raw data and facts.
3
Who should pay them? How much should they get ? How does one get a raise or a promotion?
My daughter has to clean her room but she is only 12. How much does she get?
Sorry but somethings in life are RESPONSIBILITIES that need to get done without remuneration. We have evolved from our early hunter gather existence but there are a lot more female hunters today then there ever were in history.
7
In is interesting that in most comments men are defensive whereas women argue that men do not do their fair share of housework. Men’s argument (“if we count all hours at work, men work more”) does not hold water. Of course, men work longer total hours if one adds up both paid labor and housework. It would be inconceivable for a man to relax while his wife is doing housework. But the argument was never about that. The point is that in addition to working more at their paying jobs men should share the housework equally with women. Men’s argument that they do more repairs is not convincing either. In a family where a man earns, for instance, $300/hour, it would almost always be more economical to hire a professional repairman. Therefore, most of the repairs that men claim they do can indeed be considered “fun” activities and should be taken out of men’s tally of hours spent on housework.
@Walter Do most men earn $300 per hour? Wow.
2
@Ryan Bingham Most men do not but professionals who tend to work long hours, such as doctors and lawyers, do.
@Walter And those guys have an employed housekeeper, because the wife works as a prof or real estate agent. So, no unpaid labour in that household and your example turns out to be irrelevant. Luxury problems of the 1% aren't the issue here.
2
I am a female physician. I work full time and have a husband and 2 children.
My male colleagues who have stay at home wives often are not involved in getting their children ready for or taking them to school in the mornings. They call their wives to ask them what is for dinner in the evenings. They often have the liberty of staying later to complete work because they do not have the same responsibilities at home that a wife and mother does.
You will all say that I made a choice to work full time. I certainly did, and I hope that my children will one day be proud of my choice. My parents and I had invested too much in my education for me to not continue to pursue my career after I chose to have children.
I have read the comments about all of the things that men also do at home. From my experience, there are plenty of unpaid jobs that men do at home, but in my household, there are for many more things that I have to do on a daily basis that my husband feels are more of a choice for him. I am not asking to be paid for these things nor will I neglect them. It does make me wonder if women can really have it all though.
9
@M
If you are working full time why do you YOU have many more things that have to be done on a daily basis or more home responsibilities than your husband?
No you can't have it all - if you are both working full time, why not get a nanny/housekeeper/part time cleaner to help out?
1
@Paul I do have someone to help me clean the house and do laundry. I also have someone I occasionally ask to cook meals for me. It still leaves alot to do. Maybe, you are right, I should just hire more help but sometimes that also adds more work to be honest. I guess when I got married, I assumed work would be distributed more equally at home because we were both working full time and I am making more money. I wish the solution was as simple as hiring more help, and I do appreciate your input. I am not complaining; I just wanted to comment on the article that there is still often a gender difference that I see at work and at home.
1
@M Neither men nor women can have it all.
1
There is definitely a value to what stay-at-home parents (isn't always women) contribute. If just looking at taking care of children at home in younger years, in practical terms, that can be valued at the cost of the paid child-care it replaces if the parent were working elsewhere. If earning capacity is 50k and child-care 20k, that is still a NET loss of 30k. It makes most sense for low-paid parents to choose to stay at home, where child care would be more than wages. Yet, for affluent women who stay at home who have high earning capacity, that is the luxury, as it is costing them to have the freedom to do so.
The general question of whether women, particularly married women, aren't being compensated for stay-at-home labor in cash? That they are entitled to 50% of family wages is how it is balanced to some degree.
I think this was more a problem with my parent's generation that lived through WWII. My Mom became a stay-at-home mom when I was born in 1960. I never considered not having a career even with her example. I have no idea how my parents were able to afford to raise 2 daughters on a working-class man's pay. Somehow they made it work. If my Dad had died before my Mom, then she would have only gotten 1/2 of his Social Security check... that is the big dilemma of doing unpaid work. Retirement (via SS) doesn't account for all that unpaid labor. I was able to get a college degree and earned more money than my Dad did within 2 years of graduating. I never told him because I didn't want him to know how undervalued his labor was compared to mine.
1
MASSIVE undercount -- due to the lack of projected costs of uncaredfor kids over their lifetimes.
Neglected kids without secure attachments go on to be the costliest, most ill, most addicted, and least functional adults.
So I say the hypothetical "pay" mothers of small children should be accorded must also credit them for the savings over the lifetimes of the kids....
To properly value unpaid parental work, we have to take the many costs of lack of attached parenting into account.
4
First, the monetizing of this unpaid work is actually part of the problem, especially when we do not specifically recognize WHERE or from WHOM this 'income' is supposed to come. It does not come from an outside source. Generally, the household would take it from one pocket and put it into another pocket. This article perpetuates the incorrect perspective that only monetarily compensated work is valued. Some of my most satisfying and frankly productive work I do is unpaid in the house or around my community.
Second, the 'compensation' for this work is foregone additional expenses, i.e. not having to pay someone else to do it. I know several couples one of whom stays home because the cost of working (child care, transportation, etc.) is more than they could make working at a traditional job. This is simply an economic decision.
Third, understanding there is seldom a perfect split, many articles on this subject totally ignore or devalue the unpaid work men often do around the house. I may be unusual but I do at least 50% of the 'housework' in my family. My wife does many indispensable things, e.g. shuttling kids to various places and grocery shopping. But, I do laundry, repair household items, do yard work, and manage our finances, among other duties.
All of our families are facing a truly existential threat from the Trumpist Party, and articles like this sow unnecessary discord among those of us trying to live to be a good example and to fight the good fight.
2
Having children is not a transaction. It is a selfish choice that happens to benefit society purely as a side effect. Women, if you want to make childcare a transaction so that society pays you for raising your children, then you must sign a contract that obligates you to provide a useful product in exchange for the payments. If you fail to provide an upstanding, productive citizen, then the government should be able to take you to court for failing to provide the promised product.
7
@BlueGreen
Hardly a "side effect" – birth rates determine a nation's desitiny and economic viability. In 80 years, Vietnam and Germany will be more populous than Russia and Japan will have fewer people than the Phillippines.
Its my children who will serve in this nation's military, will be paying my Social Security bills and a whole lot more. I'm afraid your cynical outlook is also naive.
2
@Wilson1ny Did you have children because you wanted children, or because you were serving your country? 99.9% of people have children for selfish reasons. They are not thinking about Social Security or the military. The fact that it benefits society is an unintended consequence, aka a side effect.
1
And this incredible number is based on minimum wage - which presumes the replacement value - that is, hiring someone else to do the work - would also be at minimum wage, which in many places is decidedly not the case...
For one, the value of unpaid volunteer work in the U.S. is given as $24.43/hr. ($41.72 in D.C. down to $12.64/hr. in Mississippi). Incidentally, unpaid volunteer work is done by about 63-million Americans and totals about 8-billion hours annually - providing about $203-billion to this nation's economy alone.
I would take issue with this item as being "largely invisible" to economists. There are dozens of papers from all over dating back to the 1990's and earlier and as recently as 2018.
2
Whenever this topic comes up, I think about one of the realities of doing unpaid work. At "retirement" (whatever that means for each individual) most working Americans are eligible to start collecting (or getting back) the money they have invested into Social Security. But if you have been working "at home" in an unpaid capacity, there is no Social Security for you (though I believe a deceased spouse who is eligible will have their benefit passed on to the surviving spouse - or something like that). Perhaps there should be a classification for "home-work" that would allow a person to pay into Social Security so that they would have some sort of guaranteed income upon retirement. The calculations to decide on the amount of the payments and the chart of eligibility would most likely be fought over tooth and nail -but it might be worth the effort.
3
@Karen Actually, all spouses are eligible to receive Social Security through their spouse’s benefits. This is not just a survivor benefit.
3
@John Thanks for clarifying that! :)
1
I am surprised at how polarized the reading of these numbers is: it is focused on the gender difference. It sure is essential. What about the amount of unpaid work by country and its repartition? Man's daily unpaid labor in Japan is bout 35’ (13% of the couple’s). For a man in Danmark is over 3 hours (44%). Is it because of their wives’ share? The total amount of unpaid work in Japan is around 4:10 h. In Danmark its 7:15 h. While doing close to 87% of the work of the couple, the Japanese woman still does about 20’ less than the Danish woman who does 56%. Hence the graphic does not only call for a reduction of gender inequalities, it also calls for a reduction of the global amount of unpaid work (8:30 h a day in Mexico!). Often, it would translate not only in “robust welfare programs” but also into progressive social measures: free and availlable Pre-K and K schools, etc.
Another difference have eluded this paper: children’s participation to the unpaid work… How often do your children take out the garbage, do the dishes, set the table, watch their siblings, effectively clean their room (rather than reshuffling the mess) etc.? When they do, is it to legitimize the pocket money you give them (not unpaid then…)?
My home seems to be atypical. My wife and I have the very same job. She makes the double: her employer is a US university. Mine is a French one! When one of us goes away, for a day or a week, there is no “long Friday” panic. They just eat more takeout when I’m away…
1
The discussion around unpaid labor should not be about achieving gender parity, but asking hard questions about why the most essential work that keeps humanity alive and thriving is valued so little within the current economic system, and how the system needs to be transformed to put care work in the center of our economy and society. What is life about, if not to care for self, each other, and the planet? A Guaranteed Livable Income for all could be a first step towards an economy and society that cares.
5
Right. Unpaid labor *in the home.* So, if my wife works 50 hours a week on paid employment, and I spend 28 hours shopping for groceries, cooking, and cleaning, the fact that her work bought those groceries and paid the mortgage counts for nothing. Nor does the fact that she worked nearly twice as many hours in a high pressure environment.
This kind of nonsense is what makes us rightly skeptical of anything labelled, "social science."
9
Did anyone notice that the figure shown for global work is 10.9 Quadrillion rather than 10.9 trillion?
3
How is unpaid defined?
If one person goes out and works and is paid by a company or government, that is considered paid.
If that person then splits that money with a partner who is staying at home and doing all of the things that are considered unpaid labor, they are in fact getting paid, just not in the context of a particular, obviously flawed economic model.
I realize that many "earners" don't share equally with their partners, but many do.
It just seems to me that the analysis in this article has a deep flaw, in that an implicit assumption is that if they can not track money transfer through government records, it doesn't exist.
Is anyone trying to formulate a an analysis that more realistically represents what people are actually doing?
3
Woman need to stop giving themselves away.
3
Shadow Work by Ivan Illich.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1360782.Shadow_Work
1
Look at the data here
https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=54757
It may be based on surveys for the informal sectors of the economy. Not sure how robust that data then is -- there are differences between countries that are difficult to explain -- or maybe not.
Ladies in rich countries: Note that time for unpaid labor includes ... shopping and travel to and from. To all: Happy women's day in advance.
Interestingly, even though the article begins with labor inequality in Iceland, Iceland itself does not appear on the graph.
2
@Valrhona No unpaid labour in Iceland anymore! Even when a single woman does her dishes, she pays herself like two bucks.
/ironics
1
If we are going to put a price on what society is willing to pay you to raise your children and clean your house, then we have to be honest about that price:
Almost nothing.
I don't care how many hours you spend or the minimum wage; that's your problem. Only you and your family care about your kids and your house. If your kids died from lack of attention, your house was a mess, and you ate lousy takeout every night, society would largely shrug.
You didn't have kids because of society. You had kids because YOU (and likely your partner) wanted to have kids. Nobody cares much outside your family. I love my children deeply, but I don't expect you to know them, love them, or care for them.
Society will chip in for a few basics, like K-12 school for your kids, reluctantly, and some anti-poverty programs. Expecting more ignores everything we know about humanity, how we feel, our urges, our needs. Society didn't want your kids, it won't love them and raise them well, and asking society to pay you to so is just foolish. If you don't want to sacrifice to have children, then don't have them. Society will be just fine with that. Society will NEVER pay a parent enough to make parenting a "fair deal", nor should it.
-- Widower who raised two children alone
9
Women are the unpaid workforce that allows men to live in the style to which they are accustomed.
6
Instead of doing their own housework, American women should contact with other Americans women to do each other’s housework. Therefore, they would all get paid for doing housework.
1
Reading the comments here it is no wonder to me that women are less happy in marriages than they are single while men benefit from that same marriage. And before you drag me yes, I am happily married.
This article might have been clearer if they factored in paid working hours (since 75% of mothers still work). I would imagine the number of hours women put in would still be higher due to the unpaid labor of the household.
The fact that so many here shrug off this burden as a choice and say it is its own reward just shows how little value we place on the typically feminine work. To all the men who are stay at home dads and pulling your weight I believe you and I thank you but unfortunately you are the exception that proves the rule. With better social safety nets for both genders this can change.
https://nypost.com/2019/05/28/unmarried-women-are-the-healthiest-and-the-happiest-professor/
2
So what is the point of this data? Are you advocating that women in India, South Korea and Japan ought to move to Sweden?
I suppose research is needed to show that not every culture in the world is the same. If the data show otherwise, that would be a real scoop!
2
@John Dal Pino
I am replying to my own comment. The article states that in the US, "women still perform a disproportionate amount of unpaid work — and on top of their full-time jobs." The description of the calculation methodology however doesn't say anything about whether the woman has a paid job, full time or otherwise. If everyone worked (women and men) who will do all of the unpaid tasks? A minimum wage earner can't hire another minimum wage earner to do a full day of formerly unpaid work. This article would benefit from some economic analysis.
2
Oh for god's sake!
As a single man I worked every day then went home and shopped, cooked , cleaned and never thought I should be paid for simply taking care of my own household. WHY DO WOMEN THINK THEY ARE ANY DIFFERENT HERE?
If they are single, they already do it - why should they suddenly be paid for it just because they are in a couple?
Gay couples often have one person staying at home to housekeep and look after children... THEY don't spend their time demanding to be paid for this.
What makes women NEVER stop complaining?
If these women were living alone or as single parents - like many men - they would be doing full time jobs and the housework and shopping too. Your sense of entitlement is beginning to grate!
ENOUGH ALREADY!
5
@Ken "If they are single, they already do it - why should they suddenly be paid for it just because they are in a couple?" Because once you're living together, you're no longer only doing YOUR housework.
Would you do someone else's housework without being paid for it? And without complaining? Because if so you can come to my house.
5
@Ken
So I'm assuming from your tone that you're still single?
Things get vastly more complicated when you throw another person in the mix. Every evening I tidy up my kitchen, and many mornings I have to do it all over again JUST SO I CAN MAKE BREAKFAST, because my night-owl husband makes snack after snack to eat while he's watching movies all night. He leaves a real mess behind, and no amount of arguing or reasoning will get him to change!
2
Talk about spinning facts. Yes, women do more unpaid labor than men, on average, women have, on average, more time to do it. Most men work outside the home for pay. More and more women do also, but there are still enough stay at home women to skew the statistics. It would not surprise me that women who do work outside the home (for pay) spend more of their free time working around the house than men do with their free time. Part of that is compulsion driven by instincts, part is societal, part because many men grew up with that situation and we tend to perpetuate our history. But I, and most of my male friends, contributed equally to work around the house and caring for our children. Some of that is because I and most of my friends are college educated and we learned to do household chores when we were living on our own. I was lucky and my mom made sure when I went away to college that I knew how to take care of myself. Only about a third of Americans have a four year college degree so we are not typical. Note that I said that my mom made sure I could manage household chores. My dad taught me to make and repair things and take care of the yard, which is the skill most men leave home with. Maybe moms and dads need to spread the knowledge around a little better.
2
I find it to be dehumanizing to characterize acts of love, family, and responsibility as unpaid labor. The family unit is a team and requires efforts by the parents (and to some extent the children) for the family as a whole to survive and thrive.
1
Full disclosure, I'm a man.
That said, I've watched my mother work like a dog her whole married life while she worked a job as well. She's 68 years old and still doing it all while her husband sits around wondering when his dinner will be ready. I look at her and for the life of me can't figure out why she didn't leave him decades ago.
I know it is not same for women everywhere in the world, but for women in the United States: if your husband is unwilling to carry his load, find a new man. It's never too late.
189
@Lousy Shepherd
A new man or no man. I’ll be 68 next week and I wouldn’t be married for one day to a man like that.
In June I’ll celebrate 45 years of marriage to a man who has always done his share of household work, including care for our two children. I wouldn’t have married or stayed married to a man who wouldn’t.
24
@Lousy Shepherd Or no man. And live perfectly happily on your own.
18
@Lousy Shepherd
Your post goes to the heart of the matter.
11
Yesterday I had to take the day off from my paid job to handle unpaid home and family chores that would have cost upwards of $1,200 if we had to pay someone else. My chores involved driving kids to doctor's offices, walking dogs, purchasing groceries and doing a whole-house clean-out prior to our home closing. It was exhausting. I for one am tired and made a vow to stop doing all this unpaid labor. It will take some type of labor strike for the rest of my family and society finally valuing all we women do.
2
What strikes me here is that there is no way to accurately identify and calculate unpaid labor. Studies that ask participants to evaluate how much unpaid work they do are notoriously inaccurate and unscientific. All capable people participate in unpaid labor but very few could accurately identify how much and very few track such work. I participate in house work including dishes, laundry, vacuuming, house maintenance, etc but I can’t accurately define how much. It’s not something that I keep a journal for.
1
Both men and women pay a high personal price for the inequities of the labor market. My mother-in-law taught kindergarten to put my fahter-in-law through seminary in the mid-1950s and then spent 20 years as an unpaid employee of the United Methodist Church in Central Texas before returning to teaching in the early 1970s. My father-in-law was punished for her return to the workforce, which enabled the two of them to buy a house, with less favorable church assignments. My mother spent 10 years as the sole caretaker of my severely handicapped younger brother, a job that only ended when my father--who later told me "The choice was either institutionalize your brother, or wait 2 years and institutionalize your mother for exhaustion and depression"--was able to secure my brother a place in a new federal institution for profoundly handicapped children and adults that opened in the 1970s. That's now closed. I don't know what families do now if one spouse or the other works in an industry (and here I include pastoring) where the unpaid labor of a spouse is expected, and the lack thereof is punished. That happened more in my parents' generation, but it's still a big issue, as many employers typically expect women to have child care duties, but don't expect that of male employees or actively frown on men who actively share those responsibilities.
3
Personal choices and responsibility anyone? Is anyone being forced to perform unpaid labor, or are they simply making choices for themselves, with full awareness of the conditions and consequences?
2
The proposition that all women who forgo a paycheck in order to work in the home are “unpaid” is too facile. The oversimplification is especially clear in “community property” states, in which all assets acquired during a marriage, including earnings, are legally owned 50/50 by both spouses. And should the earning spouse die first, the surviving spouse inherits ALL of the deceased’s assets, will or no will. Thus in community property states, women homemakers might not get paychecks, but they generally do acquire real wealth for the work they do. They generally are, legally and in fact, paid.
It’s more complicated in “common law property states,” in which non-earning spouses’ property ownerships are determined (should the need arise) by pre-marriage contract or case-by-case in courts of law. Still, non-employed women homemakers in these states typically do receive appreciable fractions of their spouses’ earnings as “in-kind” payments, e.g., lodging, food, clothing, and perhaps medical care. But they do lack legal protections provided by "community property" law, which IMO should be the law of the land.
I can’t argue that women’s work is often under appreciated and undervalued — it IS. But I do argue against economic oversimplification.
3
@RR : well, they get "assets and money" if there ARE assets or money.
When I divorced 30 years ago...the only thing we had were DEBTS to be divided up between us...a mortgage on a house that was "underwater"...student loans....car loans!
To assume there are assets, cash, pensions etc. to assume a very upper middle family & lifestyle, which are not true for 90% of Americans.
What about the men who lost their lives in fighting wars abroad under the U.S. flag. They were underpaid.
What about all the men who were drafted and forced to fight in Vietnam who were killed or injured and are now physically and psychologically scarred for life? Surely, they were underpaid.
Both sexes have suffered their own discrimination and unfairness.
1
@Michael
Men need to stop fighting one another so they won't have to worry about going to war. Women have never had a say in this, and in this case men have brought the unfairness upon themselves. Women are much less likely to see the value in killing each other over territory and possessions.
1
No one promised to pay me for housework or caring for my parents. Why? Because ultimately this is all voluntary. At the end of the day, no one requires me to take care of my own belongings and/or my parents.
My husband also does housework and cares for his parents. No one pays him either. Yet, I never see articles written about it to encourage him to believe that somehow he is oppressed.
We both work full-time and struggle. We are partners not competitors. If the author would like to pay us for our voluntary labor to care for our family and home, please shoot us an email.
5
@Emily S The issue is that statistically women do much more unpaid work than men - not that unpaid labor exists.
2
@CS Where do these statistics come from? How accurate are they given that there’s no way of knowing what the real average is?
@CS ; but WHO MAKES THEM DO IT?
Are men forcing women to do this?
Or is the truth that men don't care that much -- they'd live in a pigsty, if they could. And let their kids run around barefoot in grimy clothes. And reuse week-old towels and never change the sheets.
If women do this, because THEY -- the women -- want a clean house, clean kids, healthy meals -- they are doing it largely for themselves.
Cue men complaining that they also do unpaid labor at home for their families - certainly worth remembering, but not the purpose of this article.
A reasonable next question: who benefits most from women's unpaid labor?
7
is there an offset for men taking out the garbage ?
43
@Paul Wouldn't that simply be included under "unpaid labor"?
(Defined in the article as "what the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development defines as time spent doing routine housework, shopping for necessary household goods, child care, tending to the elderly and other household or non-household members, and other unpaid activities related to household maintenance")
10
@Paul
Sure, a five minute credit for every time he does it, because that is how long it takes.
33
Every action by anyone, anytime must be monetized? Look up the meaning of "reducto ad absurdum" and then get on with your life.
3
If you are a wife doing labor for your husband, he should pay you for that (not other taxpayers).
And, if you are a mother, doing labor for your children, they should pay you for that (not other taxpayers).
And, if you resent your husband and/or children for the labor you do for them, don't worry, they are paying!
1
@Jose Pieste I don't agree that children should pay their mother for labor; they don't choose to be born.
The parents should be paying for labor related to childcare. This means that, in an average situation with 2 parents, a mother doing labor for her children would half pay herself, and the other parent would pay the other half. Just as should (imo) be done if an unrelated person were doing the labor.
If the mother has no other income, then she pays herself using the payment from the other parent (which should be the same amount she owes herself).
Women do get a bum rap. All around. Sexual harassment at work. Wage differentiation with men. Unpaid work here, in this case. No wonder they’re so upset. I would be, too.
9
Fine work! Thank You.
Makes sense to me.
"It is notoriously difficult to value because the normal market signals of supply and demand don’t work:"
Yes, absolutely.
And therein lies the more fundamental problem.
The world's dominant information processing mechanism or app — humans deploying monetary code — no longer works, even as a heuristic, for encoding the computation and weighting of complex relationship-value information.
Furthermore, we're asked to use that app to encode Global complex relationship-value information.
We can't do it.
Exhibits A & B: The Sky and Ocean are being armed with weapons of mass extinction.
Code & Complexity — A Fundamental Consequence
Complexity increases weaken the efficacy of code, whether the code is genetic—language—moral—religious—legal—monetary—software, etc.
Exponentially accelerating complexity has crushed the information-processing efficacy of humans using monetary code.
The app lacks sufficient information processing Reach, Speed, Accuracy, Power & Creativity — All of which are fundaments of passing selection tests.
Think of your immune system. If it doesn’t process novel pathogen relationship information with sufficient Reach Speed Accuracy Power and Creativity, you’re dead — you fail your selection test.
Legal code is also being overrun by complexity. Genetic, religious, moral, them too.
So yes, women and their huge labor / value contribution are absolutely undervalued.
Life itself is undervalued — systemic breakdown.
3
Three issues lurk in this piece:
(1) Who does the most unpaid work?
(2) Who does the most work?
(3) Is there exploitation?
From the article, we know that the answer to (1) is that US women do 1.5 hours more unpaid work than do men.
To answer (2), who works more? we note that the full-time male workday is 8.9 hours, while the number for women is 7.6 hours. Thus, full-time men work 1.3 more paid hours than do women.
When we account for part-time work, where men work .2 hours longer than women, the overall number becomes 1.4 more paid hours for men than for women.
Thus, the extra paid hours for men (1.4) are about the same as the extra unpaid hours for women (1.5), so that the two sexes work essentially the same amount.
Is there exploitation? The article certainly suggests there is: "women still perform a disproportionate amount of unpaid work — and on top of their full-time jobs."
Not so fast. As we have seen, men work more on their jobs, and it averages out. Men and women work the same total amount, so they pull equal weights.
So, for marrieds, the issue of exploitation rests on the answer to an ancient question, one dating back to long before the use of money. Given that each works as hard as the other, does each bring as much to the partnership?
I ain't touching that one.
********
For singles, he'll have more money from paid labor to spend on booze, and she'll have a more developed home life built by her unpaid labor.
Who's ahead? Your call.
4
@alyosha Agree with all of this, except where you say that men and women work the same total amount so that's ok then. The issue is that a greater fraction of men's work is paid and the amount they get paid per hour is generally higher so for the same number of labor hours men have greater financial reward.
1
@CS I admit dodging this question. It's the immense one of female and minority pay being less than that of men, or white men. Just the soccer pay issue would need ten columns.
We should do it continually, and in great depth. But not try to squeeze it in here.
1
@alyosha
Why is it that women work fewer paid hours? Is it because they are expected to get home ASAP to do more of the unpaid work that men can traditionally opt out of?
It wouldn't be surprising...
1
Gee, I wonder what the ultra-grossly underpaid value was to the labor of male soldiers in just the 2nd World War.
All the value calculations in this article are nothing more than excuses to support sexist political efforts to gain special treatment.
3
One thing that can be done to improve this situation is if you can afford to pay someone outside the home to do the work -- do it!! Value your time and energy. Hire someone to clean your house twice a month. I realize this isn't an option for many (it isn't for me). But I also know there are many women who feel bad about hiring someone to clean, as if there's something horrible about paying someone to clean your toilet. If we want people to assign more value to "women's work," start paying people to do it.
@Birdy : if you can afford it -- and cleaning the toilet is so onerous and terrible that you and your spouse fight over who is stuck with the job -- then please just hire somebody else to clean your house for you and be done with it.
Miserable fights over "who does what" are … miserable and ruin marriages and lives.
My own feeling is you should do the things you like (or at least, don't HATE) and which you are good at doing. I like cooking and I am good at it, so I do the cooking. My husband loves puttering, fixing cars, doing yard work -- so he does that.
I don't think women feel guilty about hiring house cleans so much as they can't afford it -- so they WANT to do it, but the money just isn't there.
Most fights are about money, at the root.
This is not news to the women who are doing all this.
4
All you have to do to get privileged male snowflakes' attention about unpaid labor and child care and the need for reproductive freedom, is give males uterus'. Males' viewpoints would take on rapid clarity on the subject.
@Michael W. Espy
True. But we would then be able to argue that we should get paid for it.
This article is sensenionalist, highly deceptive, and dysfunctional.
3
Ummmm....can we calculate all the time men have worked to support women, please?
1
@John Bloe
Yeah, right. Your comment is straight out of the 1950's. Self-pitying men have always liked to imagine that women are lying flat on their backs at home like lazy, kept cows while men are forced to slave away... The support men have given women typically has to do with producing new generations of people, which is part of the unappreciated unpaid work this column addresses.
And remember, it has always been the men of the world who have excluded women from gainful employment, not the women themselves...
Worth at least that much. Looks like reparations are in order here. Good luck getting a bill for reparations through a Republican-controlled Congress.
The whole capitalistic paradigm stinks. Capitalists (the wealthy) must get taxed more. Period! Or off with their heads.
OK, how about the labor that men do? Many married men with children I know do this work along with their wives. We also take care of the kids, do grocery shopping and cooking preparation, vacuuming and cleaning. In addition we also take care of recycling/garbage disposal, gardening and all outside work and many do repairs/paintings around the house. But of course NYT feminists only care what the women do. Men are irrelevant to them, enemies who exploit poor women.
1
@Ilya
The article asserts that women do about twice as much unpaid work in the home than men. I frankly don't know how one gets information to formulate such a figure.
It would appear to be very personal and resistant to quantification.
What a bizarre way to frame the issue.
I got up today, showered, dressed myself, did the dishes, made breakfast for the kids, dressed the kids, took them school, and drove into work.
Where do I send the bill?
These are just the daily tasks of living life.
If the point is that women do more of the household tasks and child-rearing, we know that. We know it has an effect on their careers and is also generally unfair. The gap is narrowing but there is still work to be done, yes. It doesn't require this bizarre framework to get across though.
5
"Today, women there [in Iceland] have one of the highest rates of labor force participation in the world." This sentence undermines the whole basis of the preceding article. Women all around the world are already part of the labour force - it's just that many of them provide the unpaid labour which keeps the paid labour force fed and cared for. Instead of measuring equality by the extent to which women participate in the previously male dominated world of paid labour, lets focus on how well men and women share the unpaid work of feeding and caring for themselves and their families. Caring work is real work.
2
Cue all the amazing men that want credit for doing yard work and taking trash out. This article is not about discrediting male unpaid labor, which in the US has only recently risen. Bravo if you share unpaid labor responsibilities. I'm sure your partner appreciates it. But this article is about the fact that for centuries women have done the vast majority of unpaid work (look at those numbers!) and even when they ALSO work full time outside the home, they do more of the unpaid labor. Look at the graph - it shows male unpaid labor as well (so, there ... you're getting your credit). The point is that it is far less than female unpaid labor. How do we change this? How do we improve? As a working mom in her 30s I see so many of my friends completely overwhelmed and resentful of their spouse for not helping (enough). A major issue is not the tangible tasks like grocery shopping and meal planning, but the emotional labor of constantly planning and organizing family schedules.
6
@Facts Matter
Facts matter is one can actually prove them.
How does the author know how much more unpaid work women did than men over "the centuries"?
And if, as was mostly the case years ago, that men did the work that brought in money, and the money was used to support the woman and household, was the women's work truly "unpaid"? And frankly, what is the present economic relevance of how much work women did in the home in say, the 1600s?
The issue today is balancing unpaid work needed to maintain a modern household when both partners work full time jobs. The article says women do twice as much. But I don't know how one accumulates the information to arrive at that figure- polling? But
that is not a problem that will be solved by talking about people getting actually paid wages for such work. Its inherently part of a changing society and interpersonal relations.
1
The work of half the human race that is absolutely required to bear and raise functional children is not valued in terms of the one thing that our society values: money. It is assumed that if a woman is a mother, the father of her child or children will go out and make money so the mother and children can eat, have a place to live, healthcare when it is needed, education for the children so they can grow into responsible adults, and all the other expenses required for a decent life. Men in the comments below talk about making enough money so their wives can stay at home and do as they please. In that perspective, women aren't working at home. They are having fun, doing their own thing. But, in our economy right now, it takes two people working outside the home to pay living expenses unless your family is in the top ~ 25% of households. So, ladies have two jobs (one outside the house, one inside the house). The inside labor is unpaid. If you are a single mom, it gets worse. Thus, the labor to produce the next generation has no value in our culture, yet without it, we have no future generation. Women are abused with virtual impunity throughout society. We don't trust them to be leaders. We consider them weak and stupid. Women are the worst denigrators of other women. Is this directly correlated with the fact that women's labor to create and raise the next generation is not considered worthy of economic compensation?
122
@TDHawkes your comment, "Women are the worst denigrators of other women" is spot on. I don't know how women and their work (inside and outside the home) can be valued if we women don't value each other and each other's work.
12
@TDHawkes Perhaps you don't value family, but I will tell you many do. That's why husbands and wives have made a team to get their lives done together. And an extended family and community can help too. But no, you don't get paid for washing your own dishes. You get paid for washing other people's dishes.
5
@David The reason women have had to team up with men is that historically we were not allowed to earn money and take care of ourselves. The high domestic violence rate and the rate at which males refuse to contribute to the wellbeing of people they father is evidence the fantasy of the nuclear family does not work. We will fix this because the kids do matter.
14
My boss was awarded the paycheck, but his wife did ALL the office work AND raised their six kids AND kept the house clean. When he retired she told him, "If you can retire, so can I..." and promptly hired a housekeeper and cook.
4
What would happen if 90% of men stopped working for a day?
2
@bill
Women would take their jobs! And get better pay and benefits for having done so!
Let's start today, shall we?
1
Imagine if you had to pay women to give birth. Now that could be worth some money since obviously men can't do it.
There were no maths presented to show what a solution would look like.
1
What if anything is your point? If you demand payment, stop doing that housework!
Don't forget to inform the Taliban that they should start paying Afghan women.
You were, of course, assuming that such "unpaid" women would also pay room and board. Which can retroactively be assessed as a ba-zillion times your alleged value.
1
Labour pain of women giving birth is unquantifiable
Where are the Muslim countries on the chart? I would expect at the bottom of the chart.
1
These numbers should include the value of women's sexual services to be truly accurate.
3
This is all nonsense.
Women are not victims in Western society and particularly not in America. In reality they enjoy the greatest gender privilege ever and far more than men. Our culture mollycoddles women and gives them ever advantage.
1
@Billy Ross
Privilege is not the same as rights! Privileges are granted (traditionally by men) and can be taken away (traditionally by men.)
What "privileges" do women have that are denied men?
Women, feel free to stop providing this unpaid work anytime. Assuming that you are willing to give it up, of course.
Anyone who misses it can locate substitutes at market rates. As a society, we may discover that much of that unpaid work won't be missed. And that the women providing said unpaid labor aren't all that eager to free themselves from those burdens.
When my nine year old son got very sick, my ex-husband found a rich girlfriend. The court did not take into account the fact that I left my job to care for him and lost my career and retirement plan. I paid for our move to the coast away from pollen, a trigger. He was too sick to go to school, so as a teacher, I was able to teach him at home. I created a group of parents and boys his age so he could be around kids when he was well. I went through all the equity in my home and my share of a retirement fund. My ex still has all his.
A new medication turned his case around, and he's in college now. For ten years, my entire career and personal life was disrupted. I was my son's mom, caregiver, medical case manager, chauffeur, and teacher. He needed my presence 24/7. The judge didn't award one thin dime to make up for that. In the meantime, my ex has retired on a big pension (only a small sliver comes to me) and has a wife. I haven't dated since my son got sick. The market doesn't value our contribution, but more importantly the divorce courts don't either.
5
I feel that you can't really get an accurate picture until you add the amount for women's under-paid labor to the total.
3
Melinda Gates has a memorable chapter on unpaid work in her wonderful book The Moment of Lift.
1
And of course the population on of Iceland in 1975 was fewer than 220,000--about the population of Des Moines today.
Try organizing a feminist protest of Iceland's 1975 magnitude in, say, India? China? even the US?
2
Men object to this characterization. That's why it isn't changing. Surprise!
5
It is not clear that the main issue here is to have men perform more of the domestic labor, since this would just shift some of the unpaid labor from women to men, but it would still be unpaid labor. So the more fundamental issue is that of the advantages that capitalists get from labor that they benefit from (they need properly-fed workers, whether men or women, who have clean clothing, who are taken care of at home when they are sick, etc., not to mention the labor in procreating a few labor force) but do not pay for. Also, if we are truly interested in treating our fellow beings justly, what of the enormous unpaid labor of animals?
The more basic problem of unpaid domestic labor is that we need to reconceptualize the relation between wage labor and the domestic labor that capitalism just assumes will be taken care of.
1
This is risible clickbait.
3
Just drink the Kool-aid and keep telling yourself this is the highest calling a woman can have....
1
Our family is a product of the 60's. My wife of 56 years has spent the vast majority of working career as an unpaid stay at home Mom. Using the articles assumptions on wage and hours worked, had my beautiful wife received a wage for those unpaid hours she conservatively earned $1,642,500 during that time.
Thank you for the reminder for International Woman's Day.
257
@cherrylog754 : well, if your wife "worked" as a homemaker...who was her employer? YOU! you were!
Did YOU earn $1.6 million over the last 50 years? I doubt it! and even if you did, could you have paid it to your spouse as a salary?
As a husband and dad...did you literally do NOTHING? never took out trash? cut the lawn? fixed the cars? killed spiders? watched the kids?
I know my husband does a lot of unpaid labor in our home -- including when the kids were small -- but I never considered that I owed him an hourly wage for taking care of his OWN KIDS or his OWN HOME!
14
@cherrylog754 There's something terrible yet hilarious about the fact that the first response to your wonderful reflection on how much your wife has added to your life is a call for you to be bitter and complain more. the ungrateful will never appreciate the value of a happy marriage, both monetary and otherwise.
17
@cherrylog754 Well, she didn't earn it, but she avoided having to SPEND that much by doing it herself. You can't claim things you do for yourself have value to others. Do them for others and you'll get paid. You don't get paid for taking care of your own issues and messes and needs.
5
And in other news, rain is wet. This is the underlying reason for "traditional roles" of women. They provide free labor. Period. Women become less willing to do ALL of the free labor that keeps a society running smoothly once they reason their real worth. It is why the oppression of women is a common theme in religion and in culture. It is a big open secret and women buy into it.....
7
The ZENITH of analytical idiocy.
2
This doesn't seem to count the free, invisible mental labor of constantly taking care, keeping tabs and overall ensuring the well being of the family unit. Little things like setting up appointments, attending PTOs, figuring out what winter boots to buy your child, organizing a birthday, worrying about a child's fever and spending time looking up what to do online, sending out holiday cards- the time-sucking mundane tasks that are the glue of the family- that rests mostly on women. If that was factored in (in addition to the physical labor) we would be millionaires.
3
@N : a fairly large percent of women today have no children -- both singletons and married women with no kids.
Are they all millionaires because they really have no need to do "unpaid housework" or unpaid child care?
I don't think so.
In America, men typically work 2 -4 hours more per day than women in paid labor. Doesn't that count for something?
The gender wage discrepancy within professions is almost exclusively because of more hours worked on the part of married men and single women than hours of work performed by single men and married women.
Between professions, women are more likely to select professions that require fewer hours of work than men select.
1
STRIKE!!!!!
1
Women provide a tremendous value for which they received far less than they've earned. To rebalance the scale of justice, it's not sufficient that they only take equal value for the value of their work going forward -- rectifying the past injustice is morally necessary, not optional.
1
What if doing something that benefits others for the sake of doing something benefits others is simply the right thing to do irrespective of compensation? How can you attach monetary compensation to helping the elderly or children or the homeless, and others - irrespective of your gender - and suggest woman carry the load and are leaving money on the table? I don't worry about other societies because that would be cultural colonialism as an FYI. I do however appreciate the articles premise and I sincerely believe this world would be calmer and quite possibly a better managed place if there were more women in leadership posts, but people (you, me, just about everyone who is able) should serve others without giving a thought toward compensation, it makes people's lives better, but that's not what this article is about is it?
Utter nonsense.
3
This is no surprise at all.
Add all the underpaid women in the workplace and it will more than double the total!
We have been sold a crock for generations, ladies!
1
So what you are saying is that there is no emotional or spiritual angle to taking care of a home and children. That all of human life is reducible to dollars and cents or the equivalent. That women should be paid because there is no biological or evolutionary purpose to a woman's work, any more than there could be anything to a man's work. That in your brave, new world of "equality" all anyone will live for is the cold calculation of "worth," measured arbitrarily in units of consumption. I say Hogwash. My mother's life was worth as much and a lot more than that of any distracted female middle manager pretending she doesn't have periods or any father attempting to provide a mother's love to his children.
3
Now do men! In my household, I do the bulk of the shopping, the cooking, major outdoor work such as snow removal and and have had the major role in taking care of aging parents in recent years. Oh yes, I own and operate a small business and work full time. This may not be the norm, but still, there likely are a lot of $$ unaccounted for by "unpaid labor" by men. Get real.
55
@Gordon It's right there in the article, you just have to calculate it. In the US, men's unpaid labour was worth ~$940B compared to women's $1.5T. Meaning that US women did ~$560B more unpaid work than men in 2019. That's why this article is important.
107
@Gordon I'd propose, but I'm already married.
17
@Greg But why should it matter if it's more the women doing this work, than men? If we are talking about somewhat advanced nations such as the US, I'm not aware that women are being forced into this labor.
So if these women choose to do this work, and not get a salary for it, then it was clearly their choice. And if they don't like it, then they need to speak up, or change their situation. Again, this is assuming none of the women in question are being held against their will.
People forget that marriages/committed relationships come in many shapes and forms, and whatever works between two parties is between them. Often one brings in the money while another manages the home. And if one person is doing both (working outside the home and managing the homelife) again, that's their choice. If their partner is not pulling their weight in the home, then the other needs to address the issue like a grownup. All this 'complaining' is pointless. If you don't like your situation, change it.
2
There's something insidiously wrong with this article. After talking about the value of the unpaid work that is done overwhelmingly by women, it implies that the only way to give it value is to provide strategies that allow women to move into the wage-based economy. That is a profound devaluation of unpaid labor, and just more of the same old same old. We are so bound by these inherent biases, we can't see the path through the forest or the trees.
How about exploring ways, outside of the current cultural strictures, to value that unpaid labor. Does the respect and the rewards we as a society can give it have to be $$$$?
3
Let me change that, because what if we were to start paying men and women who are doing all that unpaid labor, rather than ask them to change jobs?
Isn't that what "On the Basis of Sex" was all about? getting funds to the person who was the caretaker of his parent?
1
@NS In our capitalistic society, yes The only way we know how to value something is by putting a dollar figure on it. It's the basic premise of the whole operation.
1
Married women who do housework earn exactly half of their husband’s pay and are entitled to half of the family’s assets. If they also work, their husband earns exactly half of their pay. Unless, of course, there is a pre-nup.
1
Can someone explain how in South Korea the total work done by both women AND men is around 4 1/2 hours, and yet in the US women and men do around 6 1/2 hours?
If women in the US simply did 2 hours less work, they would equal the men in hours worked, and the family could still get as much work done as South Koreans do (if they were similarly productive).
Problem solved!
These are always my favorite types of articles because the point is always clearly borne out in the comments section.
7
An excellent example of why UBI (Yang's Freedom Dividend) would benefit our country so well. Warren's Policy, combined with Yangs, would have been a super ticket for Women and Minorities. We are so afraid to do the good thing in this country.
3
Assigning a monetary figure to a pet peeve is rather disingenuous. Nothing is ever the way you want it to be.
2
What those Icelandic women did was shameful. Can you imagine the backlash if 90% of men decided one day to stop going to work and taking care of their families? And women wonder why more of them aren’t sitting on corporate boards.
1
25% of stay-at-home moms with children under 18 are men.
I'd write more but I have to vacuum.
2
Add in the underpaid work of America's nonprofit sector, where women account for 73% of it's 14M member workforce. OH, and it's the 3rd largest employment sector in America.
Americans are 4.25% of the world population. You say US women would have earned $1.5 trillion and and globally women would have earned $10.9 trillion. I don't understand.
1
$10.9 trillion and my dinner was still cold when I got home last night. Don't go giving my wife a raise.
1
There's nothing female about running your own house and raising kids. I do both.
1
What kind of garbage statistics are these??? In my long career as a married white male, I mowed lawns, taken out garbage, and raked leaves. I replaced light switches, painted walls, built shelves and washed cars. I took children to school, guided homework, dried dishes, and stayed up late to butler after house guests. The list goes on. What accumulated virtual "salary" have I and my compatriots forgone?
4
@Robert Lebovitz
Apparently, the author maintains that she has accurate statistics as to how much unpaid work at home is done by men, and how much by women.
Women do twice as much as men.
Note that in cases of two earner families, this concept is accepted as true. Perhaps it is. If so, women are getting the short end of the stick.
But, I have no idea how one would go about gathering this sort of information in a way that made sure it was accurate. Mostly, it appears that some men are better husbands than others.
1
Calling the work every person has to do in order to take of themselves "unpaid labor" is absolutely ridiculous. I'm a bachelor with no woman in my life to clean my house or cook my meals, does this mean I'm entitled to pay for the work I do around the house for nobody's benefit but mine? Entitled to pay from whom?
Doing chores is the bare minimum for existing, acting like you're entitled to be paid for it is just absurd. When I was a child I was made to do a great deal of "unpaid labor" for the upkeep up the house and family, and I considered this fair. Why? Because my parents paid for the house, they paid for the food, my clothes, all the utility bills. I wasn't paid an allowance for this work, nor should I have been.
I have to wonder at the sheer entitlement of people who get to the point where they feel they deserve to be paid just for drawing breath on this earth. Get over yourself.
4
I absolutely love this! Thank you NY Times for this article.
Women choose to do this labor. If they don't want to do it, they shouldn't. But insisting on doing it, and then complaining about their own choices and blaming men, is hypocritical.
2
This editorial fails to treat each partner as one household unit.
Imagine a man makes $60,000 year and his homemaker wife makes $0. Their combined household income is $60,000. Divided by 2, each person makes $30,000.
The wife's time is spent running home and family. The husband's time is exchanged for money. His income pays the bills: mortgage, food, healthcare, clothing, retirement and recreational activities.
Don't think for a moment that he hogs his entire paycheck for himself: his wife absolutely has sway over how that money is spent. She is in charge of planning and budgeting many things equally important to the act of collecting a paycheck. And her involvement in the PTA, Scouts or field trips gives her the privilege of spending time with her children, and the power of guiding what they do as youngsters.
The real issue is not unpaid labor, but how family time is spent. The contributions of each spouse allow the family to prosper, grow and live harmoniously. Please stop fomenting the gender wars with these ill-conceived think pieces.
5
@Fred Your assumption is that one partner makes a wage, and the other partner makes zero; your assumption is that the man works, and the women does the unpaid labor. However, 3 out of 4 women work outside the home. The problem is not that some families choose to have stay at home parents, the problem is that when there are two working spouses, the woman is still expected to do the majority of childcare, housework, cooking, errands, etc.
Perhaps the problem is also in the assumption that women do not work or contribute to the wages of the household. For most households, that is not true.
1
@Kristina Please reconsider the point I made, and not the assumptions built into my example. In your example, you assume each contributes an equal amount of income from paid work. In that rare case, I agree with you.
My point was that the concern for many families isn't who's getting paid for what. Rather, it's the success of the family unit itself and the ability to spend and manage time appropriately.
Finally, the working married woman with children tends to be employed part time. In this case, my point stands.
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@Fred 75% of women work full time.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/percentage-of-employed-women-working-full-time-little-changed-over-past-5-decades.htm
In a world where women are stay at home parents or work part time and pick up extra household responsibilities, that makes sense. However, we should not base our assumptions that the average woman is in either category. Most women work, and when they work, they work full time, and are paid 80% of their male colleagues' salaries.
Keep in mind also that when a woman works full time but is the one who needs to prepare dinner, manage after work childcare, etc. then women can work fewer hours and therefore earn fewer wages. In an equitable society, the "free" labor would be split between partners. Sadly, this is not the case, and that is the central problem. Men benefit too when their partners earn more!
Yes, a household operates as a unit. But it is a dysfunctional unit if one person is expected to do more work, and the data says that is what is happening.
1
If American *men* earned minimum wage for the unpaid work they do (e.g. cut the grass, other yardwork, fix the mailbox, paint the fence, unload the car after Costco runs, take the dog to the vet, move furniture, change lightbulbs, etc., etc.), they would have made $zillions…..can’t we just accept that there’s always work to be done and people needed to do it? Why does this have to be a men vs. woman thing?
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@k8 Because women have to do the chores socially assigned to them on a *daily* basis and have had to make much larger sacrifices because of time spent doing those daily tasks, whereas men are socially assigned interval-based tasks and do not have to make expensive/high-stakes trade-offs. Just ask my wife.
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@Wodehouse
Much of the household work performed by women, cooking. cleaning, laundry, require substantially less attention than the household work performed by men. That is how soap operas became successful. Women could iron [a task rarely performed today because of modern textile technology], vacuum the floors [also substitutable via a rumba], laundry, washing and waxing the floor [no longer necessary to wax because of improved technology], cook all while working for a few minutes and then watching TV or reading a book.
Mowing the lawn and yardwork do not involve putting something in the oven and then reading a book, they involve continuous labor. The same for most maintenance and repair work.
In 1800, women worked 12 hours per day, as did men. Today, men work 10 hours per day in paid labor and it takes a maximum of four hours per day for all household labor. Women in the paid workforce rarely work over 6.5 hours per day in their 9-5 days, with an hour for lunch and two 15 minute breaks.
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@k8 Agree with you wholeheartedly. There are social norms that effect both men and women. This article is complete nonsense.
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I find the claim that women do a larger share of household work questionable. In 2020, it shouldn't be so easy to keep reviving old presumptions - and exploiting them for ideological purposes. My parents were married 50 years ago. When I was a child and teenager, my father always did far more work around the house than my mother. It was really obvious. The younger two of my three older sisters, still at home when I was young, would complain about him running the vacuum cleaner at the crack of dawn on a Saturday morning. He made bread by hand. And on and on. This despite the fact that he worked long hours in Boston as a senior partner in a small real estate law firm, did a lot of pro-bono work, was president of a legal aid organization, etc.. We also had a small farm - mostly chickens, sheep, an occasional pig. I fed the animals at night, rinsed out the chickens disgusting and awkward-to-manage water bucket, etc., but my father did most of the heavy work, mucking out the stalls, etc.. My mother did comparatively little, occupying herself with photography, her own projects and conniving with her friends. Modern ideology has a deep set contempt for acknowledging that both current life and the past simply do not fit into politically convenient stereotypes. You may say that mine is but one case, and that these 'statistics' are SCIENCE - but given the ideological march through the institutions, sociology has lost some credibility. Feminists are modern Lysenkoists, not scientists.
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We also need to see a comparison of hours spent by men and women doing paid work and ask why that is. That is an important part of the equation. Should a man be expected to do equal unpaid work if he is also doing all of the paid work? If a woman is not working because her partner refuses to do the unpaid work, that's one thing, and her partner needs an attitude adjustment. But if she would just prefer not to hold a paid job, that's a very different matter.
Interesting, this quantifying the labor of unpaid roles in the house. So I am curious- women are worth trillions- how much are children's labor worth and why isn't there a movement to give them 'reparations' as well? How many dollars are saved by adults with 8, 10, 12 year olds setting the table, doing the dishes, washing the bathrooms, folding clothes, taking out the garbage, scrubbing the floor, putting dishes into the cabinets. Let's pay all of these exploited women AND children.
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Please use the term homemaker (and abolish the terms stay-at-home mom or housewife) because homemaker reflects the value-added by those who turn a house or any living space into a home, typically women. Those who don’t understand all the multiple tasks that must be managed to maintain a functional household may not understand this distinction, but I’ve always been offended by those who ask homemakers if they “work” as if they didn’t.
During jury duty in the 70’s, a DA asked me if my wife “worked.” Maybe his question hit me wrong, but I proceeded to tell him that my wife and I had two pre-school children and that her full-time, 24X7 role was to take care of them and turn our condo into a home for all of us. No, my wife didn’t have a paying job outside the home, his real question, but I considered what she did to be valuable, tasks and responsibilities I couldn’t begin to do either as efficiently or effectively as she did.
Even though a monetized economy will never be able to fully compute their value to society, for those who use words as tools of thought, consider linguistically valuing homemakers, the foundation of our most basic institution, the family.
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Aren’t these just baseline activities of daily living that adult humans - be they male, female, or intersex - need to do to maintain their homes and their families?
I certainly think tasks should be equally divided between spouses if both work outside the home full-time (my husband and I split things equally because we both work outside the home full time).
On the other hand, if one partner works outside the home for 10 hours per day and the other partner does not, then it stands to reason that the latter spouse would engage in the family/home maintenance work ( NB that spouse’s food, clothes, mortgages are being subsidized by the working spouse.)
It just seems odd to me to quantify the usual things adults must do for self/home/family in economic terms. It’s just “adulting”, to be divided up among spouses as they see fit!
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This debate always seems to be framed in the context of heterosexual couples. But if housework is to be paid, shouldn't single people also be compensated for keeping their apartments clean? And how would we determine how much work is necessary and how much is done out of personal preference? When I moved in with my partner, he had not dusted his apartment for years. To me, that was intolerable, so I spent time cleaning it. To him, that was entirely unnecessary labor. Should neat freaks be paid more than slobs? Helicopter parents paid more than free-range parents? People who cook elaborate meals paid more than people who eat microwave dinners? How would we monitor how much work is being done? Should women be paid for all the time they spend applying makeup and shaving their legs, since these are activities expected only of women? Maybe what we really need is a universal basic income that supports people to spend certain amounts of time however they want.
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So is the point every time I empty the dishwasher, the government should send me a check?
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Any thoughts to how the dominant religious beliefs of a country play into this issue of inequality? Just asking...
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Imagine thinking that someone should get paid to clean their own room or cook their own food or look after their own family. Hired services like cooking and cleaning are luxuries. You pay someone else for things you ought to be doing yourself.
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This is an absolutely useless analysis containing a dearth of empirical validity and reliability. Shoddy at best, motivated by bad intentions at worst.
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are you kidding me.. this is ludicrous. If I decide not to have kids (I didn't have any), I should pay for people to stay home and take care of kids. what is the issue here. accountability, rights? what? Folks shouldn't be having kids until they have set themselves up to take care of them. If you are a panther and you have a litter of kids in an area that has no food, your litter isn't going to make it. At some point are we not still part of the food chain, are we not still part of nature.
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@matt
With that philosophy, you shouldn't get any social security funds coming from the next generation's earnings.
You didn't earn it - accountability, right?
You didn't contribute anything to producing, housing, feeding, clothing and educating this the next generation, who will help support you.
@Dr. M yes, i understand that, but I just feel this is the beginning of applying a $ value to the independent choices we make.
i also put into social security, and i would think that we have many other options other than social security, if there are less people my wealth is going to increase because I will be in more demand, maybe I won't need social security.
Capitalism has never flourished in the US without unpaid and underpaid labor, not in the 1850s, not today, not tomorrow. Preindustrial society has relied on that of women, children, slaves, prisoners, peons, serfs, servants, and apprentices for much longer--from its beginnings.
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Is it really accurate to call work "unpaid" if the person doing it is receiving room, board, vacations, a car, retirement, etc.? If a woman is staying home with the kids or working only part time, while her husband or partner works full time and pays for most of the joint expenses, is her work is not unpaid. That's just how the couple has chosen to divide things up. Is her husband supposed to pay for everything *and* pay her a wage? Or should she get a wage, but then have to pay rent, etc.?
"On Oct. 24, 1975, 90 percent of Icelandic women refused to cook, clean or look after children for a day. It brought the whole nation to a standstill. Men across the country scrambled to fill in, taking their children to work...." This implies that the women were staying home with the kids. Presumably they had not been taking their children to work every day.
Women may to more unpaid work, but men work longer paid hours and have longer commutes, on average. It is not the hours of unpaid work that matter, but the total work done by members of each sex. That is pretty much even.
Is driving counted as work? When a couple goes out together it is more common for the man to drive. Should he get chauffeur's pay?
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Well, this analysis is grossly oversimplified and incomplete, particularly for the US. According to the article, US men do about 2 1/2 hours unpaid labor per women's four. What is not mentioned is that surveys indicate that on average men more than make up that deficit by working longer hours of paid labor. So are men, on average, contributing more (adding paid and unpaid hours) to the shared household than are women? It would seem so. Hmm, maybe MEN should go on strike!
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Humans are not simply political and economic creatures, even those humans who have been taught they are in their Women's Studies courses at University. We do not have children because it is economically advantageous, we do not care for children because it is in our individual best interests, and we do not buy houses, decorate our living spaces, or do things for our spouses because it is in our economic best interests.
We are driven by our needs and wants as flesh and blood animals. Children will suffer serious mental and emotional damage if they are not touched enough. Adults slowly grow insane in solitary confinement. We have a deep need to live in a society; we all care how others perceive us. And men and women, biologically different because of their different biological roles, do not have the same feelings, needs, or capabilities. This is not my opinion. This is 100 years of psychology and sociology research.
As a result, any attempt to reduce men and women to simple economics and measures of "pay equity" will fail to describe the complex personal, familial, and societal dynamics that drive us and make us behave the way we do. Screaming at all of us to change our innate natures is not going to work. We need to create a fair system that accommodates our differences. It will not be "equal". Equality in a society is impossible to define without oversimplifying. Demanding equality of outcome ignores all we know about humanity and human society.
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@Tom Meadowcroft Nicely stated, Tom!
I learned a long time ago cooking food for my family had a very important ingredient in a successful recipe: love. As does childcare and elder care. And yes though many women around the world shoulder these responsibilities out of necessity in single parenting and/or dysfunctional distribution of household work due to male defining of roles, many men are shouldering unpaid work as well in greater numbers.
On a political note, a lot of the women who don't enjoy this current distribution of 'unpaid' time spent caring for their children, cooking, doctors appointments, cleaning are probably not going to vote for Bernie Sanders who is the only one talking about getting help to poor and middle class families. Affordable quality day care for instance. Better after school programs. Quality health care that does not bankrupt the family.
You want change? Beat a different drum. Bernie Sanders has a broad based economic fairness platform that could take some of the stress out of your lives. He talks about equal pay for equal work, about helping the American families and expanding quality elder care. On the other hand, Biden offers to turn back the clock four years. I guess that's progress of a sort. Women are flocking to him.
@Bill Cullen, Author Agreed!!!!!
When will the complaining and claims of victimization stop? When did being pathetic become a thing?
Let me make a few points:
-I was a stay-at-home dad for my two kids for about three years. For me (and note that I am saying only for me) it was much easier than working (and I put my all into it.) I loved being with the kids and I was my own boss. Sorry, it just wasn't that hard. Be that as it may, for some it may be difficult. I get it.
-Women, generally, have more lifestyle choices than men. Often, they can choose to have kids and stay at home, have kids and don't stay home or just don't have kids. Generally, men don't have as many choices.
Neither gender should complain about taking care of their families, whether it's by working outside the home or in. If you choose to have kids, then not only is it a responsibility you have chosen, it is a responsibility you should cherish, ideally.
-There's a reason men die younger - more stress perhaps?
-Women, of course, deserve equal pay for equal work. But if you look at the statistics, the FACTS, from objective studies, the gap is nowhere near as large as many say AND women generally work fewer hours in the same job as men. There are great reasons for it. They go home to take care of the family. I get it. But it is still fact.
Since I KNOW there will be a huge uproar over these statements - NEVER disagree with someone claiming victim status - I will say I understand women have things to gripe about; but so do men.
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What about those of us lucky to be stay at home Moms? First of all we are on 24 hour call. Besides the volunteering, taking care of a home and family takes more than a few hours a day. Without the title we are doctors, nurses, physiologists, mediators, “handywoman” planers, budget keepers, accountants and more. If your spouse or significant other travels or works over-time, you can add on the help they may provide to our work and hours while they are gone. If you take the skills needed to do all of this and put them in the wage paying world the hourly wage would certainly be more than minimum wage!
And, then there are those women who do all of this and also have a wage paying job outside the home, and are still making less than they are worth!
1
I retied early and was a stay-at-home dad. I took care of the kids, cooked dinner, cleaned the house, and hung drywall. Never thought once that I was owned money. Parenting and marriage is a partnership, and if you start to assign value to individual efforts it will become a failure. BTW, I took Fridays off from hanging drywall.
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While this is a staggering sum and I do more than average unpaid labor for the US staying at home, I don't expect to be paid any "allowance" for the domestic duties. I do that out of love. My spouse and I have both worked in high paying, demanding jobs. I understand the benefit that comes with everything at home being cared for by another. One fact is very clear. The working spouse is MORE successful BECAUSE the other stays at home to manage everything else as long as it is done with an attitude that being at home is a privilege and not a sacrifice of something greater. Attitude toward the stay at home "job" is key.
This argument is classic apples & oranges, but has been trotted out for years, and is as predictable around International Womens Day as the position of the moon. It leads to misleading demands for cash payouts to "compensate."
Yet the talk of "money value" of labors of love or choice is false equivalency. What you're talking about is a mix of lifestyle choices, gender-based preferences, social safety nets, and even genetic inheritance. What you're NOT talking about is the 'commodified labor economy'. Not all effort and exertion is paid-for by a boss, except that the State can intervene to lessen the burden for those of BOTH genders who do voluntary labor.
It's all political will. I have lived in places where women were offered 1 full year of post-natal paid leave (and men, 1/2 year); men were seen MORE frequently than women, caring for kids, picking them up after school, shopping, etc.; women were more active in certain major areas of work than men, and over-represented as college graduates. This was not mandated by a commodification of home-work, but by political and cultural shifts in the population.
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Seems like the problem is that, in our country, we are being encouraged (or forced), more and more, to fend for ourselves. It's a gender issue and a class issue. Would we care as much about "unpaid labor" if more of our needs were met by public facilities and government/tax-funded services? Instead of going to the library, we are encouraged, instead, to buy e-book equipment and e-books, subscribe to an ever-growing variety of subscription services for movies and music. We even consider it normal to pay a subscription for the privilege of buying stuff faster and gaining access to the option of buying more subscriptions (Amazon Prime). What about healthcare and health insurance? We are being discouraged from considering our healthcare as a right and are instead encouraged to fight to the death for the private health insurance we supposedly "love" which, unless you are a Congressperson, costs a lot of money. I currently do not have a job and take care of my young daughter. My husband works, but does a lot of housework and takes care of our daughter too. I'm not sure if what we do at home should be considered "work," though full-time daycare costs close to $10,000/year. I don't consider staying home to raise our daughter "work:" I want to be the one to do it. I think being "middle class" just costs more now (healthcare, internet, cell phones/service, education, etc.)? The wealthy pay less in taxes and proportionally less of their income for modern "basic" necessities.
In cases where one working spouses wages/salary cover the total living expenses for an entire household - wife, children, pets - then every member of that household IS being paid as they are all sharing in the benefits of the working spouses income.
Perhaps what this article really suggests is that working, married fathers who have non-employed spouses should get paid more.
Net family income is net family income - keyword family.
The author of this article has a very limited view of what the words "PAY" and "EXPENSE" really entail.
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Quite simply, we don’t value “women’s work” because we don’t value women. This is reflected not only in the unpaid work that falls more heavily on women, but in gainful employment as well. Historically, when women enter a previously male-dominated field, their wages don’t increase to match those of men, instead, the wages in the field decrease. This has happened with the secretarial, teaching, and psychology professions to name a few. In our society, we value (i.e., compensate) professions we perceive as masculine (engineering, technology) more than those we perceive as feminine (teaching, child care). And then there is the wage gap, where women do not receive equal pay for equal work, simply because they are women.
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@Kathryn Neel "Quite simply, we don’t value “women’s work” because we don’t value women" - I think that puts it too simply and subsequently inaccurately.
@Leo yes, I agree. I should have said we don’t value women enough, or as much as we should, generally speaking.
Many human-centric, socially meaningful, and vital jobs, like teaching and childcare, are pink collar jobs and don’t make money for investors. Consequently, these professionals aren’t rewarded with pay on par of those working in Corporate America, though these professionals have significantly greater impact in our communities than the fastest keyboard-tapping stock broker ever could dream. But companies sell us on money-status and buying stuff to keep the cycle of consumption going, and they pay those well who keep this scheme lucrative.
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Wasn't this a large part of Andrew Yang's argument for universal basic income? Maybe that guy was on to something...
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I elected to stay at home with my two sons over a decade ago. Like many women with advanced degrees, I chose to forgo a lucrative and fulfilling professional career to raise my children. I recognize the trend of "stay-at-home dads" is relatively new. That said, the world has changed, why not represent all caregivers, regardless of gender.
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So if work that is currently unpaid becomes paid, will those newly paid workers be expected to pay rent for the lodgings they reside in?
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What I find interesting about the graph is the total amount of unpaid work (men + women) in each country. Why do people in Mexico spent over 6 hours a day in unpaid labor while South Koreans only spend 3.5?
Is there a difference in time associated with transportation (personal cars/mass transit versus walking) or does technology (e.g. efficient washing machines /dryers in the home) make a difference? Are there more paid support resources like affordable child care? Smaller homes and gardens?
It seems like the more developed countries require less unpaid labor in total.
Interesting.
2
One penalty that especially hurts women is that if you stay home to take care of children, aging family members, etc.--or you drop out of the labor market to do so for a number of years--you lose out on Social Security benefits when you reach retirement age. You were "nonworking"
As far as Social Security is concerned, you must pay into the system to receive benefits, so it is important if you work free-lance or are self-employed that you pay into Social Security in order to receive benefits later.
If you never had Social Security withheld, you can receive benefits based on your spouse's income and Social Security. This from a financial website:
"A nonworking spouse is entitled to a Social Security benefit of up to 50 percent of the earner’s benefit." (note "nonworking" designation). The website also recommends investing in an IRA for your "nonworking" spouse.
Maybe this is all moot.
While Trump promised in 2016 he would not cut Social Security, he has fallen in line with the wishes of big GOP donors and the Republican Party to find ways to offset that huge tax cut he gave the rich and big corporations by trimming Social Security, Medicare (already done). He says the economy is doing so well that maybe people won't need "entitlements,"
And then there is the issue that Social Security (that we paid into) for years may run out of funds in 2035 unless Congress does something to shore it up. But the cap is $137,700 in 2020 and the GOP blocks raising it to save SS
Vote Dem
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Fantastic research. Thank you.
I teach economics at the College level and will use this article in our discussions of GDP and how it fails to include unpaid labour (among many other deficiencies). This work contributes enormously to the welfare of society (child care, volunteering, cooking, cleaning, etc.) and is performed overwhelmingly by women, yet is not considered "real" work according to GDP because there is no monetary transaction.
On the other hand, speculating on currencies on Wall Street *is* "real work" according to the GDP even though it provides virtually no benefit whatsoever to the vast majority of people. Yet economists and the media still use the highly flawed GDP as an indicator of overall well-being in our society. They cheer when the GDP goes up and panic when it goes down, despite the metric having only a tenuous connection to actual social welfare.
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Of course the same unpaid calculations could be made regarding unpaid work done by men! Maintenance around the interior and exterior of homes, yards and vehicles are clear examples. Add time demanded by the employer but not compensated for.
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This situation persists. My daughters all enjoyed a college education and advanced degrees. Each of them has discovered in the workplace that their male peers are paid more than they are. No, I could not explain this to them or make it OK.
In retirement I have come to appreciate that for me pro-bono work is liberating and meaningful. But that is my choice---not a conscription I entered because of my gender.
Lets make this "fair" and at least pass the Equal Rights Amendment to get fair pay.
One more point---when you run out of runway on this brief and hectic life you will see that the material gains fall away and the experiential is all that matters.
This should be a "free choice" for either gender not a forced march for women alone.
This is why we need Universal Basic Income and Andrew Yang.
Does that mean my contributions to my family are unpaid labor? I don't get the logic at all.
And I support women being paid at parity and advancing economic justice for women around the world.
This is akin to when someone has a business plan and says the market for this is 100 billion and conservatively my plan will get 1 percent of it. It's not rooted in reality.
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If the point of this article was to advocate for equal pay for women in the workforce as was the result in Iceland, then I don't understand the premise of the unpaid work done to keep a household going.
It seems like a convoluted way to advocate for equal pay for women.
If the point was to advocate for paying people to do laundry, clean their own house, go grocery shopping, etc.- exactly who is supposed to pay the family members who engage in taking care of the home?
The government? The spouse?
I think the best way families should approach this is to try to equally distribute the household chores as much as possible.
But that only works if both spouses are working.
If one spouse is indeed a stay at home mom or dad and is not working outside the home, then it is logical the stay at home spouse should do more of the heavy lifting of household chores in most ( not all) cases.
The stay at home spouse is getting paid in monetary terms by receiving a home to live in, car payments made, food to eat, clothing, money to spend, etc.- all from the paycheck of the working spouse.
The working spouse should also do a fair share of household duties including cleaning, child care, etc.
It's just reasonable to expect the spouse not working outside the home to do a higher percentage.
If both spouses are working outside the home which I think is a majority, then both spouses should do the same percentage of household chores.
If not, the family needs to resolve the disparity themselves.
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Imagine if the highly specialized care work addressed here were valued at a higher rate than minimum wage, as is the work of so many specialists in other fields performing paid labor. Also, scholars such as Silvia Federici rightly point out that the reproductive labor of the body is also omitted from these economic equations, both historically and in the present, and must be accounted for.
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Have we, as a society, forgotten the virtues of service and sacrifice? Do we now believe that the only work worth doing is work that is paid? It seems the pervasive selfishness and narcissism in our culture encourage us to search for any claim to victimhood and oppression we can find - which apparently includes grocery shopping and loving your family (love being an action, not just a feeling). Maybe we should be worried about our own country's dire outlook.
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@Madeline You've missed the point. This "service and sacrifice" is performed overwhelmingly by women when it should be shared equally by both men and women. And in spite of its intangible rewards, which no one is denying, all this "service and sacrifice" is worthless if the woman ends up alone without a man to support her.
I think looking at these numbers only makes sense when we look at the other numbers as well - the hours spent on paid work - and the difference between that of men and women.
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@Leo Also time commuting to paid work and time spent outside of paid work on work related concerns.
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@paul Yeah and we should be also concious of how these upaid labor is possible because of all he paid labor - cooking, doing laundry, and other house work requires money. So I guess it goes both ways.
This might not be a popular opinion, but housework and cleaning the kitchen do not count. I was a single dad, had to clean, cook, take care of school, take care of dying parents, etc. and I had to hold down a paying job. I am lucky that I make a decent living and I never expected to get paid for keeping the kitchen clean, neither should anybody else.
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Unpaid labor is also untaxed labor. Progressives want to put a monetary value on this work to take a cut for big government.
Although the Marxists want to reduce all motives to money, people are much more complicated and social than that. If we take the family as the basic unit of society, then raising strong families is the reward.
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I just feel we need to stop trying to measure this work to its economic value because the measurement is never accurate and draws criticism.
The domestic work that is done at home (mostly by women) is vital to almost every aspect of our society and should be held in high regard.
When we jump through these ridiculous hoops to try and measure this in a dollar value, criticism of the measurement get blended in with criticisms of the service.
To take it to an extreme, I am sure if I placed a labor value of tying my own shoes, I could extrapolate that across the entire country and demonstrate how Americans tying their shoes annually produces 100s of millions in unpaid labor. Of course that would mean nothing to anyone.
4
A student group from a wealthier local school district visited residents of a local assisted living community. One of the boys asked one elderly woman what she had done when she was younger. She said she cared for four children, her husband and her home. He reframed the question, "what do you do for work?" She repeated her answer. The young man pushed further by providing an example of what he meant by "work." He told the woman that his mother worked as a lawyer. The elderly woman wanted to ask who cleaned house and took care of the children while his mother worked, but chose to end the conversation. It's sad.
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Life is so hard in this modern era where we have appliances to do most everything that people had to do in the past. Most food prepared is prepared in some way. We have dish washers, washers and dryers, and robotic vacuum cleaners. Less and less of a family’s time is tied up in unpaid work and that work is easier than ever.
1
If you don't want to spend time caring for children, don't have them. Reproduction is a choice. This holds equally true for men and women.
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Here's something that I truly don't understand. If you're going to calculate the value of unpaid work in the home on an hourly basis, shouldn't it be offset by the value of the non-cash compensation provided in exchange? If my employer gave me free housing, a free car, free food, free vacations, etc. I would have to report all that in my tax returns and it would count towards my compensation. (See IRS Pub 15-B). Why not do the same for the immense value of the unpaid home labor being analyzed here?
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@Alex You assume that women are getting free housing etc. Why do you not assume that the women are also working?
According to Pew Research, about 1 in 4 women is a stay at home parent. Most women work. And these women are part of the data: women do more work in the home than men do.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/24/stay-at-home-moms-and-dads-account-for-about-one-in-five-u-s-parents/
In other words, 3 in 4 women do all of this unpaid labor AND hold jobs.
4
To say I dispirited by these comments is a gross understatement. Did any of you read the same article I read? This article points out that women do more unpaid labor in the world than men do, in some cases, MUCH more. These are the stats people! In the US, in two income houses, women come home and do more housework and childcare than men do, known as the "second shift". In countries like India and Mexico, men work outside the home for whatever a normal workday is in those countries and women work all day morning to night. In the US, studies have pointed out that men's dissatisfaction with their marriage is proportional to the amount of housework they do. Women are opting out of marriage more and more because of these types of inequalities. Additionally, both men and women feel that housework (cooking, cleaning, taking care of kids) is women's work. If a woman cleans a toilet, it is what is expected of her. If a man does it, they get showered with praise.
6
To say I dispirited by these comments is a gross understatement. Did any of you read the same article I read? This article points out that women do more unpaid labor in the world than men do, in some cases, MUCH more. These are the stats people! In the US, in two income houses, women come home and do more housework and childcare than men do, known as the "second shift". In countries like India and Mexico, men work outside the home for whatever a normal workday is in those countries and women work all day morning to night. In the US, studies have pointed out that men's dissatisfaction with their marriage is proportional to the amount of housework they do. Women are opting out of marriage more and more because of these types of inequalities. Additionally, both men and women feel that housework (cooking, cleaning, taking care of kids) is women's work. If a woman cleans a toilet, it is what is expected of her. If a man does it, they get showered with praise.
1
How are we as a society supposed to pay for that work? That's one of the problems of capitalism, everything is about money.
3
@Fred It doesn't necessarily have to be paid for. It could be equally shared by men and women, and paid work would be too.
2
@Fred Capitalism has done more to eliminate poverty than anything else devised by humanity.
Put aside the question of gender equality. What is the point of estimating the value of people doing chores in their own homes? Are you proposing to tax me so I can pay for people to clean up their own houses?
10
@Greg That’s exactly what’s being proposed or that your taxes pay to take care of other people’s children while they work.
I am stunned at how many male commenters don't believe that this is an issue.
the world RUNS on UNPAID labor performed by women. Childcare, cooking, cleaning, shopping, emotional labor (keeping inventory so no one runs out of milk, toilet paper, etc.), family relationship ties (sending cards, gifts, making the phone calls), etc.
All of this makes it possible for men to go to paid work as their primary function without worrying about the rest which is "handled".
The article shows that this labor DOES have economic value and that the costs would be astronomical.
Many studies have shown that after a heterosexual marriage, the husband is much happier with more free time and the wife is unhappier with more responsibilities and less, if any, free time.
16
@Autumn Flower True on all counts.
I was a stay at home mom, and was expected to be on duty 24/7; my ex husband worked 9-5. For example, when we went on vacation, he wanted to stay at places with kitchens to save money (no eating out), but did not want to cook or clean because it was his vacation. He did not understand that I also wanted a break.
We're divorced now, and I work full time plus run my household plus have custody of our daughter most of the time (his choice). I find my life easier, and better, outside of the old patriarchal structure of my marriage. I do hope to re-partner - but never again under the old "rules." If I get married again, it will be to someone who thinks nothing of cooking half the meals, etc. The feeling that my labor, my time, and my life's experiences were not valued is something I will never again return to - I'd rather be single.
6
@Autumn Flower Marriage is a choice. No one is forced to wed and no one is forced to stay married to someone who doesn’t do their part in taking care of the family.
1
@John Which may be way over 50% of marriages end in divorce.
2
There's an important distinction between paid and unpaid labor: people are typically paid for labor when someone else reaps the benefit of that labor. But for most domestic work, the person who does the labor also receives the benefit.
7
@Edward A The idea here is that men reap the benefit of women's work. There is also the idea that men's and women's paid work is equal. It is not considered if women also benefit from their unpaid work or if women gain from men's paid work.
1
All women should go on strike for one week.
Women hold the world together.
Women complain about their unjust burden, but refuse to take assertive action.
Actions always speak louder than words.
4
@minerva That’s fine. What you will find is that doing so will impact women as much as men.
@John Well, duh !The point is that it affects all of society.
Back in the 70s, there was a group active around the left called "Wages for Housework." They made us very aware of the financial benefits of this unpaid labor to the "job creators."
1
With all due respect, I am resentful that the powers that be think that my labor is only worth minimum wage. Take food, for example: every day I prepare my daughter and I healthy, delicious food. If you're telling me that a home chef would come to my residence and grocery shop, plan, prepare, serve, and clean my meals for minimum wage, I just might consider hiring that person!
I am 50 years old, a divorced single mom. I have come to value my own contributions to society, the workforce, and my family in a way that I did not at age 30. Never again will I sign up to be in a "partnership" where my labor is not recognized, and where I am expected to carry the household while he rests or cares for his own needs. Though I'd love to be in a partnership for all of the usual reasons, I'd rather be single than find myself standing at the kitchen sink nightly while my "partner" exercises or watches TV or reads or goes out. That is no partnership at all, and no way to live.
18
Who's going to pay me for brushing my teeth and tying my shoes? It's a gross injustice that I have to do that myself for free.
At least half of all that 'work' is superfluous and avoidable. As a single man I cook for myself and do all other work in the flat. I work with maximum efficiency; preparing a healthy meal using fresh ingredients takes me 15-18 minutes. Same with the small amount of housecleaning that is actually necessary.
My female flatmate - we keep separate households - takes an hour to cook for herself, and when she rarely cleans something, she takes three times as long to achieve half the result.
I've observed the same in relationships and my previous marriage, where I did almost all the work because my wife was so bad at it. Most women (and maybe most men too, but I cannot attest to that) do that 'unpaid work' in a manner that is so inefficient and wasteful that nobody would pay for that service if it was an actual job.
10
@GS I can't imagine why such an insightful charmer couldn't hang on to a marriage. "did almost all the work because my wife was so bad at it", indeed.
It’s not only the monetary value on your worth of doing all of the daily needs, it’s the validation of the importance of taking care of children, taking care of each other, having a paycheck to have a roof over your head, food on the table, doing the household tasks around the house, taking care of your elderly parents and even taking care of a beloved pet. That’s to name a few. Putting all our time, concern and love and the only comment I receive is that “you are spending my son’s money”. Something I would never say to anyone, it’s hurtful, it’s archaic and it’s wrong.
6
I would really rather articles like this frame the inequality as a subsidy to lazy men instead of seeing it in terms of woman-as-victim. It is good to care for the vulnerable and try to make life pleasant for people around you. We want people to be like that. Men, generally speaking, can't be bothered and worse, are rewarded for their indifference, by companies, by societies, and often by women. That's the story. Let's find out why that's the case instead of trying to monetize family life.
5
To say I dispirited by these comments is a gross understatement. Did any of you read the same article I read? This article points out that women do more unpaid labor in the world than men do, in some cases, MUCH more. In the US, in two income houses, women come home and do more housework and childcare then men do and that is what this article points out. In countries like India and Mexico, men work outside the home for 8 or so hours a day and women work all day morning to night. Studies have pointed out that men's dissatisfaction with their marriage is proportional to the amount of housework they do. Women are opting out of marriage more and more because of these types of inequalities. What this article fails to point out is that when men do perform household chores and child care they are lauded much more than women because it is just what is expected of women and if a man cleans a toilet they get a round of applause.
5
To say I dispirited by these comments is a gross understatement. Did any of you read the same article I read? This article points out that women do more unpaid labor in the world than men do, in some cases, MUCH more. In the US, in two income houses, women come home and do more housework and childcare then men do and that is what this article points out. In countries like India and Mexico, men work outside the home for 8 or so hours a day and women work all day morning to night. Studies have pointed out that men's dissatisfaction with their marriage is proportional to the amount of housework they do. Women are opting out of marriage more and more because of these types of inequalities. What this article fails to point out is that when men do perform household chores and child care they are lauded much more than women because it is just what is expected of women and if a man cleans a toilet they get a round of applause.
1
People make all kinds of life choices, including being in a relationship and having children. In addition, each person has a set of dynamics that is unique...every home has a division of labor, whether tacit or clearly defined. While these numbers are interesting, what I have noticed is that women tend to settle for less then men do in this division of labor. That would seem to be the real core of the issue. If a woman makes life choices, she can't then complain that those choices are unfair and if she fails to clearly set out the parameters of division of labor, then she needs to grow a backbone.
7
It's not really unpaid if a homemaker is being supported by a breadwinner, the homemaker gets a home, access to a joint account etc. Two people being supported by one wage. Is an employer supposed to means test a wage to reflect a dependant partner? Clearly no, because the wage reflects the value of the work. Is the working partner supposed to pay the homemaker on top of providing all the income that runs the home? I'd say again clearly no, where resources are already shared.
At some point we just need to face up to the fact that part of the reason we pair up for lives together is sharing resources and workloads.
3
The SSI argument is a false narrative. All spouses have the option of taking their Social Security from their spouse’s or ex-spouse’s work benefits if it exceeds their own work benefits.
3
@John ...yes, see my previous response to a comment...also, as I said, the lower wage earner's SS increases to the higher SS benefits when he/she dies...so, for example (yes, this is just an example): a man dies at 75 while collecting around the highest SS benefit of $40,000 a year...his wife, 70, never worked, but is collecting half of her husbands FRA SS benefits...upon his death she gets his benefits at that time...she lives to 100...she gets (not counting yearly increases) $1,200,000 in SS benefits after his death (30 years times $40,000)...
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@Jim b : the highest benefit is JUST NOW barely over $3000 (it just went up from $2900) per month.
That's $36,000 (assuming you retire at full SS age, which used to be 65 and is now 67).
Your spouse would get half that or $1500 a month…but oops, there is a maximum of (I think) $3800 a month. It might have gone up too. So let's say $4000 -- that's $48,000 and I think it is the absolute max possible.
If you earned the max SS benefit, your income was $130K or MORE and you probably have assets to go with that -- a nice paid up house and investments and a fat pension.
Most folks don't or can't live on SS alone -- it was never intended to be 100% of your income in retirement!
While that 70 year old lady COULD live to 100 or even beyond…actuarially that is rare. It is more likely to die at 65 (and never collect a dime) than to live to 100! so yours is a very extreme case.
The average SS check (for a full time worker) is $1400 a month….
This was an interesting read. Just a shame it was such a short article. Here's an idea to solve the problem: The government could conduct a study of how much raising a kid costs for say the first two years. They could then directly deposit that amount into the bank accounts of the mothers. If the government can afford endless wars and corporate bailouts, they can surely afford paying women for their part in the vital process of social reproduction. And to those who think this isn't an essential job, lets see what happens to a society when a large enough number of women decide against having any kids.
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@Nima This is essentially what happens in most European countries, which have generous paid family leave when children are born/adopted. These countries are doing something to recognize the value of what parents do and are investing in the future of their societies.
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@Nima I think we are already seeing what happens to a society when many people decide not to have kids, and we are definitely seeing what happens when a large number of people outsource child care because they can't afford to to care for their own children or jeopardize their future financial security for doing so.
1
People who are single should ask themselves why their marginal tax rates are higher while, at the same time, they get to do all those "unpaid" household chores themselves.
3
For those women who have spouses or partners, and are stay at home workers, where does the money to pay for their food, clothing, housing, healthcare and entertainment come from?
Shall their spouses/partners pay the stay at home woman an hourly wage?
If so, should the woman then pay a portion of that for their food, housing, clothing etc.?
We can all agree that in two income families, men should pick up their full share of the chores/child care.
But the article seems to want family finances with one worker to be converted into a collective bargaining agreement.
3
@Jerseytime People should do what works for their families based on their circumstances. All families are different. Some have men that do the majority of unpaid labor. Some people can do more because they work from home or are able to do less because they travel further to earn a living. Averages tell us very little.
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@Jerseytime
I just want to be recognized, monetarily, in my own right, (since this is all that matters to the Neanderthals) for making sure he didn’t have to worry when he got called out in the middle of the night. Or my sister didn’t have to worry when it was her turn to open the bank, or close it. When my husband’s younger siblings came for summer visitation, the executive secretary made it to the airport on time. (Or whatever else this second wife was up to!) And believe it or not, I once had a gal, one I barely knew, drop a baby off to me, unannounced. She knew I was home and she was a mother stressed out— no problem, we’ll go get some diapers and whole milk.
While this is all very interesting, I'm thinking that one aspect of working without "pay" is not exactly going without benefits. If not in a steady job, there is ample opportunity to use "free" hours to better the status of the family through things like sewing clothing, canning and freezing home grown produce, tending a few sheep or chickens if zoning allows - I lived like that once, and when we ended that existence to trade "up" to corporate jobs to pay for college for the kids, there was a large increase in day to day living costs that had to come out of our corporate paychecks.
2
The biggest driver of the data presented here is paid childcare leave. Biology dictates that women are the major caregivers postbirth and countries that have extended paid maternity leave (can be up to 2 yrs in certain Scandinavian countries) are coming out ahead in the metric of unpaid wages. How this model can be applied to larger countries with greater socio/economic variation is a problem that needs solving.
2
"Unpaid labor ... remains largely invisible to economists.... It isn’t a part of G.D.P. calculations and rarely factors into other measures of economic growth.... [W]omen provide a huge unacknowledged subsidy to the smooth functioning of our economies, which would grind to a halt if women stopped doing this work."
What exactly is the problem that this column is pointing to? To what purposes are G.D.P. calculations and measures of economic growth put, and how would the results be different if women's unpaid labor were included? One could also argue that we all breathe, and if a dollar figure were put on that activity the numbers we get for G.D.P. would be different. But so what?
I'm not an economist, but I can imagine that an economist would reply that it makes sense to theorize about things that can be measured relatively easily. How would it add to the predictive power or practical value of economic theories if they took into account unpaid labor?
You say that the subsidy of unpaid labor is "unacknowledged," but I doubt that it is news to anyone.
2
@Mark, here's an example of why a GDP calculation is useful. I spent 9 years caring for my parents as their health failed. In addition to my full time job. According to all the US job data, social security wage info, etc. I 'worked' just 40 hours a week. My unpaid job on nights and weekends was not counted. Why would an economist care? Because in 20 years, there will be far fewer children available to care for the elderly and that care will have a real economic cost.
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@Mark It is mostly unacknowledged, which is why we need to see an article like this from time to time. The reason we need articles on the uneven distribution of unpaid work is because this is not a bug, but a feature, of our social and economic structure, when the overwhelming majority of this work is done by one sex. And that this distribution is not random, but has deep social roots and major social consequences for women. Everyone breaths, brushes their teeth and ties their shoes, we don't need to discuss payment for that, because it's shared equally.
1
@LAS not to mention opportunity costs. I used to always have a second part-time job outside of my full-time job, which allowed me to save a tidy sum of cash to put partially toward a home down payment and partially toward extra retirement savings. Of course, that time could be used on recreational or healthful physical activities. For some people the opportunity cost of providing free labor can be quite large.
The authors argue that childrearing and domestic chores have economic value. Sorry, but not all human activities can be monetized.
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@Dr B All human experiences have a monetary dimension in terms of quality of life. I implore you to read the comments regarding the loss of Social Security benefits and the impact that has on later life.
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@LLM This is untrue. Non-working spouses have the ability to draw Social Security off of their Spouse’s work benefits if it exceeds their own.
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@LLM I believe that one cannot put a value on the rewards of raising a family and the sacrifices that entails. It is a labor of love, not money. Can you think of one problem of modern society that would not be greatly diminished if all children were raised by two people (of any race, sex, or ethnicity) in which one was dedicated full-time to the children. I do not believe that any government program can perform as effectively as a stable family.
Since men in the US, according to the study, do about 2/3 the amount of work around the house that women do, their unpaid labor is worth about $1 trillion. Who's going to pay them?
3
My mother spent every day of her young life vacuuming the entire house. There was no talking her out of it. There was absolutely no need for it, anymore than there was a need to wash every article of clothing after it had been worn once or fanatically dusting every windowsill, corner and crevice. Lots of this unpaid "labor" around the house represents purely compulsive behavior and lack of imagination.
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To be unpaid is not the same thing as to be unrewarded.
If John Locke had written the Declaration of Independence, with "the pursuit of property" instead of the Jeffersonian "pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable right, then it would be shocking for women to receive less money than men. However, since women seem perfectly happy by authorizing men to pay them less, it's not so clear to me why they do that. If mothers wanted their daughters to get more pay, they'd bring them up to make it so and they'd train their sons to expect it of the world as well. Mothers and fathers are equal parents so if the father is the voice of corruption, it's because the mother appeases him. Women must wonder how they are perpetuating the disparity of pay, but we should not forget that the quality of a person's happiness, rather than the quantity of property is the value asserted by our own Mr. Jefferson who was not stranger to a society that where free-labor was the norm, property was a corrupting form of power, and the only enduring thing of quality was the conscience.
2
I don't dispute these facts at all. However, isn't the point that ALL domestic, unpaid labor - regardless of gender - is necessary for the smooth performance of private industry? Granted, due to decades of sexism (and other factors), women have exponentially borne the burden of those responsibilities, and men have reaped the financial rewards. However, as those norms SLOWLY shift, the calculus of this article will not - it will simply become stay-at-home dads, etc., who become undervalued. It is the type of work, not the gender of the worker, that makes these statistics alarming.
3
Elizabeth Warren introduced a plan to have caretaking work (for children, elders, and disabled people) counted as work in terms of earning Social Security benefits. That would go a long way toward alleviating the poverty many women face in retirement because their work didn't count.
15
I was a liberated single woman earning as much as the guy I was dating - until we married, though I did find work at reasonable pay soon after even in another country. Children soon followed so we made do on his salary alone and lived modestly. Years later, as the children no longer needed intensive care, I returned to the workplace - earning a decent pension albeit lower than that of my husband. Now, 15 years into "retirement" we run a Mom and Pop retail shop where I am the 51% partner.
Looking back, there is no single path where everyone is always working a paid job with benefits. There is "work" to be done be it cleaning, child care, cooking, gardening it takes place in a setting without employer/employee contract. To get that work done by someone else requires paid "services" which tend to eat at any pay for outside work.
The wealthy tend to afford "staff" for this "unpaid work", but for most of us hiring persons to clean, cook and care for us is not in the cards, AND it requires there to be a large workforce earning less than stellar wages for their effort.
I once worked in a European open air museum - the agraian village model was based largely on barter and everyone, even the handworkers and the pastor, performed unpaid jobs to survive. There was no model of everyone having a corporate job with good pay and no need to perform unpaid labor. That model is simply not feasible, even if tempting.
3
After reading many comments, I have to observe that while social norms of conventional heterosexual marriage make this a gender issue, it's really a single person vs. partnered person issue. In managing our private lives, the teamwork of partnership confers significant advantages. As a single person in the workplace, I always envied my colleagues who had loving, supportive, cooperative, functional partnerships. Not only did men benefit from having wives, but women benefited from having husbands, and GLBT folk benefited from having partners. Single people have to do ALL the unpaid labor.
5
The point is not that all labour ever done should be monetised--the point is that more of the labour men do is given monetary value than the labour women do. Nobody is saying that unpaid labour isn't valuable--we all do it because it is. But in a developed economy where money is paying for more and more 'valuables' in life which used to be supplied by other means (healthcare, childcare, food preparation, gardening, etc.), the failure of those economies to monetise women's labour puts them at a serious disadvantage. I was a housewife for many years and definitely understand the irreplaceable value of the time spent caring for my family and with my young children. But now I worry about retirement and how to pay for their future education because of those years out of the workforce I'm trying to re-enter. We expect women to rely to the goodwill of others or some kind of magical karma that they will have their physical needs taken care of in exchange for their labour, while we pay men cold hard cash for more of what they do--thus giving them control over their wellbeing in a way we don't for women.
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@Annalisa The economy is not capable of monetizing labor that isn’t profitable or productive to the economy. My washing dishes doesn’t create a positive net impact on the economy but I do it anyways. The same goes for laundry, home maintenance, and grass cutting, etc.
3
@John They why can we pay those who do childcare and gardening or wash dishes in restaurants? I'm not arguing that all labour should be paid simply that we have categorised 'women's labour' and 'men's labour' differently in our economy.
2
@Annalisa If this work is monetized, I assure you it will also be taxed.
Luckily, marriage rates and birth rates have completely fallen off a cliff in the United States and the West in general, so going forward the only unpaid labor women will have to worry about doing will be caring for their cats.
5
@C
You're quite right: marriage benefits men and harms women. Married men do less housework than single men, while married women do more housework than single women. Married men live longer than single men. Women who take time out of the workforce for child or elder care (including for their in-laws) are more likely to be poor in retirement.
12
No doubt.
I'm looking forward to the Times' corresponding observation on International Men's Day, November 19th 2020: that men in aggregate do a huge amount of unpaid labor.
1
It seems an easy enough concept to grasp. Women from all walks of life and from all countries overwhelmingly take on or are left with the majority of the unpaid work associated with a family unit. This article doesn't state that men do nothing, please look at the graphic which clearly states otherwise. This quite simply lets us look at the reality of unpaid familial labour. You might not like it, but that says something about you, not this article.
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@Ode This only looks at unpaid labor, not taking into account overall labor share or what’s needed to meet the requirements of a household. Any household requires a combination of compensated and uncompensated activities.
This is all so silly. Woman, due to their unique reproductive abilities will always, by nature, be required to be the primary child care partner. Don't like the role? Don't have children. Regardless of what activist like to think, women and men are different (bodies as well as brains) and it will ever be thus. Have a loving and mutually supportive relationship and life will be OK.
3
@TED338 I work full time while my husband stays home with our daughter 2-3 days a week. When my maternity leave ended, he became the "primary caregiver". I'm grateful to not be bound by "traditional" gender roles.
2
@TED338
But there should be a way to put a value on it. I have cared for numerous children through the years, making sure the bank teller, the retail manager, the executive secretary, the engineer, the dental hygienist, the plumbing contractor, all made it to work on time, with no worries on how their children would be cared for — and it inflames me that my name won’t be on my own Social Security check. And some I have cared for are now building the planes the military flies, running banks, selling houses, routing shipping, cleaning your teeth, and educating your children. There needs to be a value on this work and it’s not my fault I wasn’t allowed to pay into Social Security.
How about the value of volunteering? The hours are countless, the rewards boundless from helping others.
3
It's not only for the jobs we did around the house, it's for how we help our schools and communities by volunteering countless hours to make them better for our families and yours. Women are still undervalued and under appreciated.
291
@Marcy When will the complaining and claims of victimization stop? When did being pathetic become a thing?
Let me make a few points:
-I was a stay-at-home dad for my two kids for about three years. For me (and note that I am saying only for me) it was much easier than working (and I put my all into it.) I loved being with the kids and I was my own boss. Sorry, it just wasn't that hard. Be that as it may, for some it may be difficult. I get it.
-Women, generally, have more lifestyle choices than men. Often, they can choose to have kids and stay at home, have kids and don't stay home or just don't have kids. Generally, men don't have as many choices.
Neither gender should complain about taking care of their families, whether it's by working outside the home or in. If you choose to have kids, then not only is it a responsibility you have chosen, it is a responsibility you should cherish, ideally.
-There's a reason men die younger - more stress perhaps?
-Women, of course, deserve equal pay for equal work. But if you look at the statistics, the FACTS, from objective studies, the gap is nowhere near as large as many say AND women generally work fewer hours in the same job as men. There are great reasons for it. They go home to take care of the family. I get it. But it is still fact.
Since I KNOW there will be a huge uproar over these statements - NEVER disagree with someone claiming victim status - I will say I understand women have things to gripe about; but so do men.
12
@Rich Its not victimization that is the point, its acknowledgement of economic contribution. For all caregivers and volunteers. Men and women. The fact is women are the vast majority of caregivers and volunteers. These activities have enormous unrecognized value in an economy. That is the point.
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@Marcy
Interesting. Do you have statistics to prove that women do volunteer work more than men?
2
And yet a company like Care.com (NASDAQ: IAC) which does not actually provide care, managed to make 3.14 billion in revenue based on a technology that aims to have women outsource the many facets of their complicated lives. Why do we keep rewarding men for creating enterprises that don’t ever provide meaningful relief to the situation we find ourselves in modern life? Businessmen will take these numbers and figure out a way to create wealth for themselves and continue to deny women a level of freedom and respect that they themselves think they deserve because of their genius and simply for being male. How about men just literally stay home and allow women to roam the world and fix all the problems created by men fighting?
11
And yet for all this valuable labor a woman as President seems out of reach. Go figure?
7
Did this study take the unpaid work of men into consideration ?
Who is it mowing the lawn in the house, raking up the leaves, painting, garbage disposal, security.
Yes you can take these figures and make believe women are getting the shorter end of the stick, yet we all realize that is not how it works. Most of the time we have clearly delineated roles in our relationships/family.
These roles were developed over thousands of years, different cultures have different attitudes and hence different expectations from their spouse/mate/whatever.
Mark Twain said " figures don't lie but liars sure do figure ".
This is a politically feel good story for women. Who cares about the men ? It's only the men who have built everything and will continue to do so, the women have traditionally taken care of the children's needs.
Judging by our education system the women have failed. The drug culture, the rock and roll hippies, all the responsibility of the Mom's and for a large portion of the equation they have let us down.
Because of their failings I would dock that hypothetical pay of their's, almost 100 %. If it was the Dad's in charge of the children we would not have antifa's, homeless colonies, safe rooms at colleges, this is all on the Mom's.
2
@Tom ,Retired Florida Junkman People have been mowing the lawn in their houses for thousands of years? Wow, I had no idea.
What about single women who do everything in their household? I didn’t think of what I do around my house as “unpaid labor”, whether working at a career or not. So what is this article about? Will it change anything?
1
The best thing that we was society can do is to stop fetishizing the business world and fawning over Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and all their “talented” people.
The work of the world is done by those with “serious intention” (as Joseph Conrad would say). Money is just money. The love and respect of your family is the only thing that really matters.
2
How many times have we heard "Where's Richard? He's home babysitting" What? When parents have paid parental leave, especially paternal leave, men bond very strongly with their babies and are more involved in childrearing.
1
This is such a weird American thing. I understand that parents want to be loved and appreciated for the work they do to take care of their children and run a household, and I expect most do it out of a combination of love and obligation. But how do you place a value on that? How do you come up with a number that reflects your love for your children and spouse?
I get it. It's America. Everything is about money, victimhood and resentment.
If you resent not getting paid for taking care of your family don't have one. Go out and get a job where everything is transactional. Or seek the love and appreciation you feel you're not getting. But money? Is that really the framework you want driving your family?
3
If every Friday was Long, things might begin to change.
Let's raise taxes on the rich so the government can pay people $15/hr to do their own laundry! Castro had a great reading program!
2
I think this article is fatally, perhaps even dangerously, over-trivializing. First, there is a great variety of different cases. Just as one example of many possible cases: consider stay-at-home mums. They spend nearly 80% of total household income on average. Pretty well done with no pay? And, should they be paid a salary for home chores -- guess where that would come from. As for women in dual income families spending more time on home chores, yes, some husbands spend that time watching tv, but many more will use the time working longer hours and bringing home more money for the overburdened wifey to spend. Yes: these are trivializing examples, but so was the story. As if there existed some miracle reservoir of money from where all these gazillions would be paid. This is a strawman article, and I am disappointed to see NYT lacked the good judgment not to publish it.
2
But isn't the solution to this simple: if you're doing work that you think you should get paid for and you're not, stop doing the work.
1
And David Brooks's favorite solutions to our societal issues involves doing more of this more efficiently.
Clearly the "Honey Do "list does not count or is really factored
In this report does it differentiate "honeydo" clean the gutters labor cost vs making dinner cost
@Longtime Chi It is factored - look at the graph! And, yes, your once-a-year cleaning the gutters is exactly the same as preparing 3 meals a day for a family (planning the meals, going to the store and buying the groceries, putting them away, prepping and cooking the food, and cleaning up after). Totally the same.
4
@Real Thoughts Well, cleaning the gutters is probably close enough to preparing 3 meals for ONE day. And the gutters are good for a year, whereas the family needs 3 meals the next day and the next...
2
As a bachelor, I cooked my own food and did my own laundry. Can someone please pay me for that? I am talking to you Bernie Sanders!
1
This is a ridiculous argument. One doesn't get paid for things that benefit you. e.g. a chef cooking for her own party wouldn't be considered, by any rational person, free labor.
Now, that said, the inequity of work between men and women is substantial. Even in the US, the difference is close to 14 weeks of full-time work across a year. That's the average, for some women it's probably close to another full-time job.
The better question is, how do we change that?
3
The work is not unpaid. Perhaps it is represented in the excess wages men receive to subsidize (men, on average, work more than women outside the home). Women receive the full benefit of the transfer of wealth from their spouse.
If it is unpaid, who, pray tell, is supposed to PAY IT?
This would only make economic sense if women had a lower standard of living than their husbands. If the women received less income, their standard of living would be lower.
The "unpaid labor" trope is an economic fallacy that feminists have given legs.
3
I'm reading the comments, and this has definitely triggered something in many people. Why not let women have this? I don't think it's meant to be compared with what men do. It just reflects something common that happens in the world. My mother worked and raised five children. In retirement she took care of my father until he passed, then both her sisters. She is now in her nineties, and her children take care of her. I think it's nice to acknowledge her contribution. However, dollars are a poor measure. Her unwavering love and her labor on behalf of her family was worth more than the mere trillions talked about here.
6
@edv The idea that women are valuable is already a widely accepted ideal, except in certain third world or Arabic nations. This opinion piece isn’t designed to create gratitude towards women. It’s designed to be a divisive trope of identity politics.
1
@edv
Dollars for what your Mom did is exactly what the article is calling for.
Women worldwide carry a disproportionate level of unpaid labor. Unsaid, is the inconvenient truth that women also hold full or parttime jobs and handle childcare and a household as unpaid labor also. Sadly, this country is moving quickly to prevent women from having the right to choose abortion.
Absent from this discussion is men, men do and assume this is their right. While these very same men are insidiously removing women's right to autonomy.
10
Interesting article. But I'm confused about this concept of unpaid labor.
If I do my own brake job on my car, is that unpaid labor? If would it only be unpaid labor if I did it for someone else?
When I trim my own fingernails rather than go to a manicurist, does that count as unpaid labor? Or only when I trim my child's nails?
This seems like a loose concept.
4
This seems to be the latest in the flood of identity politics ideas that is designed to be divisive and destructive. Some won’t be happy until society is completely torn down and rebuilt.
3
My wife owes me millions for 30 years of room & board, Healthcare, clothing allowance, travel, vacations, miscellaneous spending, holiday gifts, cable bill, subscriptions, the fours year her mother lived with us, the life insurance policies, my 401K and our debt free home which she has equal title too, half the $400,000 I spent on educating our kids, half the who knows how much spent on raising our kids, healthcare for the kids for 26 years, full use and access to our car and the upkeep and insurance thereon, the spousal benefit for my social security.
Of course my wife actually owes me nothing and i shall forever be in her debt for the fulfilled life, the joy, the happiness, the companionship and the envelope of love that has surround me since the day i met her. This article and its price tags demeans women and the roll they play in the human race.
14
When the girls in the larger cities, way back when, decided to stay working, I’m not sure it ever dawned on them how the new two income household would work out in small communities. Currently, it’s grandma tasked with picking up the kids after school, filling in on sick days, covering Christmas break, Spring break, Easter break, parent-teacher conferences, and summer vacation. (But, I wouldn’t want a low-paid stranger taking care of my grandchildren, either!) However, I’d always hoped I’d get to work out one day, too, and have money, after mine were raised. Too late now, this grandma is dog-tired! Thanks girls!
1
Women have been paid less then 80% of men's wages. This means we also pay 80% for social security. This means women
also receive 20% less social security then men. This needs to change.
Matthe
211
@Matthe Croteau Every individual gets paid based on their own qualifications and background. Social Security is factored based on what an individual pays in. A woman that earns $100k a year doesn’t get less Social Security than average and a man making $30k doesn’t get more.
9
@John That's precisely the point -- for socially normative reasons (and lingering sexism, sometimes) typically do as much work or more than men, if home labor and work labor are taken into account, but stereotypically "female" tasks are awarded less recognition AND pay. If "female" labor like childcare were recognized as financially and socially significant in the United States through affordable childcare, etc., more women would make more money (through the ability to enter the workforce) and under the current system, be paid more through social security.
22
@John But a man working the same job and getting paid more than a woman will get more social security.
12
I do understand your point, but on the whole it seems a bit sexist. Men do work around the house, care for children and so forth as well. Do women do it more often? I am sure they do, but your analysis seems a bit slanted. Further, whether you wish to believe it or not, women are often more compassionate, particularly when it comes to caring for ailing relatives. Haven’t you noticed that?
36
@T Smith Isn't it convenient to say that women are just more temperamentally suited to the unpaid work, rather than looking at the myriad overt and insidious ways we socialize them to assume these unpaid burdens.
350
@T Smith Look at the graphic in the article that lays out hours per day of unpaid work for both men and women.
25
@Keith Siegel That is not true, compassion is not a DNA given it is a socially encouraged trait. Men are supposed to be stoic, stiff upper lip and strong. Women are told to be giving, caring, emotional. Well I know of plenty of women myself included who have decided we like the former traits and have zero interest in raising children, caring for sick relatives or any of the other "they are better at it because they have ovaries" skills.
48
Women's work and care for humanity is so critically important to society. It is PRICELESS, beautiful and so appreciated by me. I don't need to see a big dollar number on it to know that. thanks for the article
2
I was a stay at dad. My wife is a performer and her main job had union protection with benefits. I was a freelance artist so the choice to stay home to raise the kids was an obvious one.
I cooked, cleaned, choufered, coached soccer, refereed, and much more for no monetary return whatsoever.
I'm nearing retirement age now as an empty nester. Social Security says I'll be getting a whopping $300 per month in retirement benefits. My wife will be getting $1800 per month.
Anyone who chooses to be involved in the day to day minutia of raising a family with a few children pays a price.
No it's not just women's unpaid labor that isn't valued, it's anyone who either chooses or is forced to maintain and care for a family.
I am still questioned today on why a man would do what I did — Mostly by women.
297
@Salvatore
The law recognizes your labor in the marriage, and therefore says you are entitled to half of her SS benefits. So, there is no inequity there.
26
@Salvatore
There are not many of us men who have taken on traditionally female roles in our society, but there are some of which I am one also. I cared for my elderly mother for 15 years while also providing child care for my sister for the first ten. I'm a single guy with no children, and to be honest raising my sister's child was amazingly rewarding to me as a human being. My mother just passed away 5 months ago. I'm from a large family 9 kids! I did 99% of my mother's care. I'm grateful that she left me the family home, as that is a big deal in Silicon Valley where home prices are outrageous. Just want to say, "thanks mom" for looking out after my future in your trust".
For my career, it was a horrible decision. I was a research chemist for 18 years, now it would be difficult to get a job washing glassware. It's certainly true that women perform the bulk of the domestic duties, but as a guy who did "women's work", I can say that my life was a lot richer raising a child and caring for a parent. It was difficult, exhausting, and underappreciated.
70
@Jose Pieste
In my state the marriage must last ten years before SS benefits , and do not receive if a divorce occurs before that period.
15
The American economy would collapse without women's unpaid labor. This is certainly the main reason why we are so reluctant to allow women equal rights and equal pay - it would cut into men's profits.
The question remains: Why do American women continue to prop up a system that is dependent on their exploitation?
Certainly there is enormous propaganda foisted onto women here to get married and have children, even though every study that has come out in the past forty years indicates that women who are married with children report the lowest levels of happiness and well-being. Given this reality, no wonder so much money is spent convincing women that their lives won't be complete until they become a wife and mother. Without the steady stream of propaganda, it's doubtful American women would do either.
But of course, instead of spending money and energy lying to women about the joys of marriage and children under our system, wouldn't it be smarter to simply construct a society in a way that isn't built on women's free labor? Unfortunately, the only way this will happen is if American women stand up in real ways and force change, which doesn't seem likely when they are so busy picking up the pieces of a crumbling system that really only benefits a few (rich, white) men. Perhaps that's the point.
9
As a stay-at-home mother, I am appalled by the overwhelming critical comments. I earn nominal paychecks from freelance editorial work and do a significant amount of unpaid volunteer work but for the most part, I am a very well educated housekeeper and caretaker. People often think this means I must be well off enough to make this choice when in fact it is a difficult one that requires significant sacrifices that benefit society. Not to mention that someone would have to be paid to watch my kids if I worked more, eating at the relatively low earnings for my field. The real insult is when people ask if I "work"! Never mind the lack of pay (or at least a tax deduction) and what I've given up because I think this is the best decision for our family and society. The negative reaction by so many to the suggestion that this critical unpaid work should be acknowledged is further proof of the problem.
383
@JRF I think its important to distinguish between a choice that people make from many good options and a choice that people make from a few not-great options. Many parents who work full time or stay home full time are doing so because of a lack of good choices. Either their pay wouldn't make up the cost of childcare, or there is no other parent to contribute income or childcare wise, or their partner's pay is so low in comparison to theirs that they must be "breadwinner". I think its absurd to look at how drastically different these numbers are across countries and insist that all those people are making choices in the same circumstances.
23
@JRF
It’s nearly impossible for any working educated mother with children to cope without having a right-hand mother and grandmother, or a paid 24-hour nanny. There are business trips and the early morning commutes and meetings. However, I have figured out who is truly holding up the world.
30
@JRF The ultimate reminder that unpaid contribution doesn't matter is that none of the work done is resume worthy. Tending to children and the elderly is not considered "work" in our society unless it is paid. Even then, it is considered sub-par work with no career recognition. Ask any teacher, housekeeper, home aide whether their work is properly compensated and the answer is likely no. When it is unpaid, it is unaccounted for and unacknowledged. You can put editorial work on your resume, but who puts "caretaker" as part of their experience. On every level, our society diminishes this contribution largely because it is seen as cheap and/or free. Perhaps it is best to go on strike, and have children run loose on the streets and have sick elderly relatives take of themselves.
42
Are cutting the grass, taking out the garbage or fixing the sink labor?
Is waiting for my wife to finish dressing comprehensible?
In the rare instances in this country today where the wife is stay at home so the husband can work longer to bring in extra, is that extra not income?
Are married couples no longer allowed to be a united single unit?
This study has some serious bias and structural issues that would be embarrassing to most academics.
5
@Dennis
"Are married couples no longer allowed to be a united single unit?"
Agreed. Raising our children to adulthood was a choice, not a job. It was our joy and life's mission which we both did holding careers as professionals. Most of the rest of the "chores" would need to be done whether we had children, or not, much less if were married or living as singles. In the end, you are not going to get paid for cleaning your own bathroom.
1
Wow, I'm surprised at how uninformed so many of these comments are. The point is that private profits depend on the values produced by this unpaid labor. Those at the heights of the global economy rely on women across the world to do NECESSARY work, for free, so that their business empires can reap the rewards.
594
@DS EXACTLY. The answer isn't necessarily to commodify yet another sphere, but to do so as an exercise to point out the LEAST society and these private companies can do is put in their share for healthcare, childcare, elder care, education and a social safety net--it will cost far far far less than the trillions of free labor they are getting.
59
@DS
Your post sounds very certain. It asserts positions in a way that challenges anyone who disagrees by labeling them "uninformed". But your post has absolutely no support for a very broad premise.
My question is: How is, say, a Mike Bloomberg "at the heights of the global economy" because women are not paid wages to perform housework and child care?
If you are saying that more women would work if our society had government paid pre-school, after school care and national healthcare, I'd agree. But I don't see that as being the point of the article. It seems much more focused on the notion that basic family chores should result in actual paid wages.
10
@DS -
We’re all poorly informed; myself specifically. Uninformed.
One way how this sorry state of affairs evolved. Slowly. Quietly. Thoughtlessly.
2
All of us should do less work, have smaller homes, acquire fewer objects which require attention and maintenance.
1
I did not see any Muslim societies.
I did not see anywhere, even in the comments I have read, any mention of the power of evolution to structure society. The idea that we ought to instantaneously change based on what an economic model develops is simply scientifically simplistic.
After all, this great economic system of worshiping growth at the expense of sustainability provides us all with microwaves and dishwashers, frozen meals and bottles water, plus enough gin to ignore the rings in the toilets and clutter everywhere.
Oh, I forgot kids; so also did a world hurtling toward a too hot to handle state.
@Drt
There's Turkey. Of course, up until Erdogan, it was probably the most "westernized" of the Muslim countries.
While it would be interesting to see other Muslim societies here, can you imagine how to go about evaluating the cost of labor today in the war-torn middle east or drought-stricken Africa?
In her book The Price of Motherhood Ann Crittenden lays out a case for the establishing an economic value for work women provide to their families and notes that while its incredibly important it can’t be listed on a resume. This puts women at a disadvantage if they do decide to re-enter the workforce later on.
When women choose to step away from their careers as scientists, doctors, lawyers or waitresses to stay at home, we all lose. Leaving the workforce for the unpaid, undervalued responsibilities of managing children and a household leaves women some with a sense that they are no longer contributing to the society and not having that weekly paycheck leaves them with diminished socio-economic status as well.
Shorter work weeks and more paid time off for women and men would be a win for society, women and families.
4
I have heard this song time and time again. If the authors of the article think that my day, when I was working, ended when I left the office and headed home. That is not quite the case. I do a lot of unpaid work at home, but do not put a dollar value on it. When I moved here, there were 41 trees in my 1/2 yard. These were not saplings, some were three feet in diameter. All had to come out and it was not my wife who did it. It is not my wife that mows the yard on a regular basis and it was not my wife who brought in the stone and terraced off the back yard which was a gully before that was done. Only this last year did I have someone else paint the house. For 45 years, I painted the house every five years and never had anyone even stir the paint for me. If I were to print a listing of all of the heavy lifting that I have done in the 48 years of my marriage there would not be enough paper in the house to print it off. I was born to hard work, I don't mind it. The only things that I do not work on in this house are plumbing, gas lines, or appliance repair. Some how figure a cash value on what I do, and have done, for the last 48 years for which I received no pay.
3
@Bill Dooley Did you ever try watching the kids, washing the floor, and doing laundry while your wife is out mowing the lawn? Just wondering.
1
Family value is more important than monetary value, Period.
3
@Raj Kumar
Yeah, and that butters the bread.
1
Let's be clear. I do not want to be appreciated for the mom work I did when my children were growing up. I wanted then and now to be financially compensated. Then, I needed the money. Now, I need the Social Security benefits I did not accrue. It is called taking a hit for the team, twice.
75
@Gayle Have you told your children that you expect financial compensation for raising them? How did they respond?
5
@Gayle The work you did was invaluable, but it was done for your family. If anyone were to compensate you, it would be your husband and children. If you like, you could set up a formal arrangement where your husband pays you explicit wages, then you would pay social security taxes and receive social security benefits. Of course that would be ridiculous, since you don't need capitalism to manage close social relationships.
4
@Gayle I agree the social security problem is a serious issue and needs to be solved. A law that mandates to split the SS tax of the employed partner and books half of it to the account of the household caretaker would be only fair.
1
What to make of this analysis? I am not sure. Should every type of labor be fodder from "the market"? I'm not so sure. When I drive my children to a friends home, is that labor? When I "volunteer" at a soup kitchen, is that labor? When I change my babies diapers and sing to her, is that labor? When I cook dinner for a family holiday or celebration, is that labor? In the midst of all these activities, should I be thinking, "Gee, I'd rather be flipping burgers at McDonald's for 15 dollars an hour or billing $1000/hour at Cravath to defend an opiate manufacturers?" Don't get me wrong. I believe in a robust set of social welfare policies -- one that includes childcare, healthcare, college education, heavily subsidized public transportation (not just highways), etc., etc. Also, year-long paid parental leave. But I'm ideologically opposed to the notion that "market rate" should penetrate how we conceptualize every waking hour. Should all lovemaking be considered "sex work?"
8
Gee...should I get $0.50 for brushing my teeth? $5.00 for cleaning up after dinner? $15.00 for setting up the patio furniture in the spring? Some work is part of existing and raising a family.
4
I don't quite follow this. The article refers to being paid for "routine housework", but routine housework has to be performed by everyone, including single people living alone. Do those single people deserve to be paid for simply maintaining their households?
Women are certainly exploited in countless countries (and by countless men) around the world, but I think the study loses its footing a bit when it includes work that everyone would need to do for themselves regardless of whether they live with a partner or children.
10
If we think of the economy as the production of the good (as did Aristotle, among others), rather than “goods,” then things get even more complex (and possibly even more sexist, of course, requiring us to get beyond Aristotle). But a non-philosophical social science approach to these questions doesn’t seem all that fruitful other than pointing out obviously considerable injustice.
What do “pay” and “income” mean when the conversation is philosophically expanded to “the production of the good” as distinct from the abstract “money?” A “stay at home” spouse’s work may (or may not) be more valuable (to some things, not others) than a labor force spouse’s work.
"Unpaid labor" "Shadow Labor" These are negatively skewed labels. If we are framing domestic activities in economic terms, it should be something like, "Family Investments." Because these activities are investments not labor. And these investments generate huge family and societal returns. The real issue here is a fair living wage for whoever is laboring in the traditional work place environment. A fair living wage should incentivise and support "Family Investments." Currently, families need two jobs to stay afloat or "get ahead." And then they must either pay someone else to raise their kids and run the household or use social services. It is in this way that low wages prevent "Family Investments" while placing the burden on tax payers to subsidize these lower wages. Bottom line: We need higher wages that execeed the Cost of Living Index; the S&P 500 Index of "Family Investments."
2
It isn't just unpaid labor that hurts women economically.
The market in the U.S. and the patriarchy elsewhere (e.g. Russia) confines women in low paying jobs. Until 1964, this was entirely legal in the U.S. with employment ads listed for women's vs. for men only.
The federal government, under Reagan, changed Social Security to a 35 year average instead of the top three years, with allowance for ten years of zero to be excluded. Any woman doing unpaid labor for more than ten years is going to have zeros calculated in her lifetime earnings average. No wonder,the elderly poor in this country on Social Security are mostly American women.
"Honey, this is how the patriarchy works!"
8
Interesting arguments reflecting how far we have come.
And by that, I mean NOT that far.
Women, throughout much of human history, were considered property. Families had to produce a dowry when betrothing a woman to a man. Through thousands of years, men's vs. women's roles have been defined in terms of men being the "hunters" and women handling the "domestic" chores.
To be sure, we have made progress, but the outdated views of gender roles are deeply rooted in our culture. As a society, we must constantly reexamine these relationships as we strive for equality between and among all people, men and women.
And, to be transparent, I write this as the husband of a "stay-at-home mom" who not only works every bit as hard as I do (arguably harder), but whose work in raising our children is inarguably more valuable.
3
It should be worth the amount cited, but it isn't. Because society (mostly meaning men in this case) have decided this work doesn't deserve compensation. If the Brooklyn Bridge ever really goes up for sale and the asking price is 1 billion but the only offer that comes in is for 1 dollar, then sadly, that is what the bridge is really worth. The same with women's unpaid labor. Since men seem coy and reluctant about stepping up, women need to STOP doing the unpaid work, let the chips fall where they may -- hard as that might be -- and let society wake up to the fact that this work has real value. Not just "thanks ladies!" value, but value that comes with a paycheck.
5
I hope Wezerek and Ghodsee enjoyed concocting their numerical fantasies. If a tax accountant gets paid $100 for doing someone's taxes, and then does her own taxes, should someone pay her $100 for that? No, because then she would get the benefit of the work (a completed tax return) plus the payment, which obviously none of her customers get. There is absolutely no difference for child care or house cleaning.
In fact, the greatest joy of my life was the time I spent with my young children, and I've never met a woman who felt differently. If child care is a burden for which women should be paid, as Wezerek and Ghodsee assume, why do so many women deny fathers access after a breakup? I had another child later in life, and for close to two years the mother has been denying me access. According to Wezerek and Ghodsee's economic theories, that doesn't make sense -- why would a woman self-impose a burden? But, as everyone else knows, denying a man the joy of being with his own child hurts him terribly -- and she takes pleasure in hurting me terribly. (As well as hurting the child, who doesn't understand why she's not allowed to see the daddy she loves.) But according to Wezerek and Ghodsee's theories, she's not hurting me, I'm exploiting her! This article is so offensive it makes me feel sick.
5
I know many single people who do unpaid labor. Would the authors have them pay themselves? Adding in the value of unpaid labor would make the distribution of household income look less skewed and would make the tax system appear more progressive, but I don't see the practical implication. Should households that consume lots of "off the books" unpaid income have to pay in a portion of that value to the income tax and social security system, for example? Where do they get the cash to pay?
5
@jbulow
Indeed. You have pointed out the absurdity of this study.
Its worth also exploring the extent that labor laws and norms affect men's role in this. Japanese men appear to do the least unpaid labor, while Japanese women apparently also do less than American women - so it's not strictly an issue of "traditional" family roles. Japanese companies are notorious for expecting employees to stay in the office late and to attend after work drinks late into the night. How can men contribute more at home when that is the workplace culture?
If in a marriage the woman keeps house while the man works to gain money, and with that money the woman receives shelter, food, health insurance, a car, car insurance, clothing, vacations, etc etc etc, is it being claimed that she receives no compensation for her work? In my happy marriage I make money and my wonderful wife does an ace job of keeping our household running like a top. Neither one of us considers this to be any form of "exploitation" but a mutually agreed upon division of labor between a loving couple based on each of us doing what we do best and what we enjoy doing. Perhaps those whose purpose in life seems to be to constantly set us all upon one another with grievances should allow some room, particularly within the intimate setting of marriage, for people to work out their own arrangements.
11
@Social Democrat
Love a good mansplain. Arrangements like yours are RARE these days. Most women work full time AND do all the work for the kids. My old office- it was women shuttling kids and getting things done, while working. Men with kids did very little.
Most couples must have 2 incomes in the US to keep a family fed, in a home, and with healthcare.
I dated a lot of men who had been married and they consistently complained about 2 things- one was how busy their "kid" week was and the other was about how their wives "let themselves go" when they had kids. They never made the link that full time work plus caring for a kid and home with no help did not leave time for the gym.
So yeah, the system worked until women also added work outside the home as a necessity to support the family's basic needs.
13
@MC
Kidding aside . . .
It seems that the main issues involved are the following:
1) When a man and woman decide to have a child(s), is that child then considered a public benefit or a private? In my view it is both: the child will grow up to one day help pay my social security, etc., but the joy she brings her parents I will not participate in; and I doubt she will be visiting me when I am old or making sure my prescriptions are filled and etc etc as I now do for my parents. This dual-nature of the benefits of childbearing suggests to me that the collective should help parents with the child-rearing burden though not all of it, and that the percentage of that is difficult to determine. As a social democrat I believe that providing affordable child care for all will take the burden off of parents to the extent of allowing both parents to work.
2) If a man and woman decide to have a family, and both work full-time, and the man doesn't do his share of housekeeping or childcare, I think wife has to sit husband down and explain the meaning of "fair."
4
@Social Democrat
May we hear from your wife, please?
If this point of this article is that much of the work women do is underappreciated by society, then of course I agree.
If the point is that this "unpaid" labor should become "paid" labor, then I disagree. The primary beneficiaries of this unpaid labor are the family itself -- the children, the spouse, the relative, the laborer his/herself. Obviously children are not going to start paying their parents for cleaning and providing meals. Would we force spouses to pay each other for "unpaid" labor? That type of formal transfer of money between spouses is incongruous with most notions of marriage and partnership.
So, what third party are we going to ask to compensate this unpaid labor? Taxpayers? Investors? Paradoxically, the more people refuse to engage in this "unpaid" labor, the more labor supply there is and the less pressure there is to increase wages. This further reduces the likelihood that families could decide to have a stay-at-home parent.
4
No quibbles per se with the stats. But I have some with the concepts. First off, societies that have yet to make the transition from agriculture to industry are going to come off distorted. Is all of the field work of a peasant family "unpaid?" If men and women both work in the field and sell their crops, someone is being paid. Who?
Second, consider the so called traditional family, where the male is the out of the home bread winner and the wife is the stay at home care giver and house keeper. The male earns a salary for his 8 hour day. Let us assume for the sake of argument that he deposits it in the family checking account. While he is working and traveling to and fro from work - maybe a ten hour process - his wife does her counterpart chores. She is not being 'paid.' But nonetheless she is able to pay for the mortgage, the heat and gas and water, the food for the family table, the home appliances, vacations, etc. So is the concept of 'paid work' the right one?
Now how about the childless woman who lives alone. She works outside the home, comes home and cooks and cleans. Is anyone suggesting that someone else should pay her for cooking her own dinner? People have to take care of themselves - no body thinks they need to be paid for that.
A comparable childless male is in exactly the same situation. He probably does less "unpaid work" because his standards of cleanliness, etc., may not be as high. Should he be paid, but at a lower rate, for taking care of himself?
3
Add in the unpaid work women do /at work/ - the extras that must be done but that aren't high value in the promotion structure. Sadly, women either volunteer for, or are assigned to these tasks more often than men.
In academia, this work is often in the realm of "service" (to the program/department/ university/profession/community) or in extra focus on students (pedagogy, advising) above research efforts.
With women already underpaid with respect to men, this additional inequity adds insult to injury.
6
I want to start a me too movement around child care. Child care on weekends, during school vacations and during summers can be confining and isolating. It can even be boring. The hours are long and sometimes time hangs heavy. And the effort it entails is often not acknowledged. The men in my life have done the minimum and the kids resent the inadequate care from their fathers. My granddaughter begs her father to spend time with her and to assuage her he says things like I’ll be there soon and when she insists on a specific time, he then worms his way out of providing it. I find it infuriating.
10
Although it is true that many women have made the choice to stay out of the paid workforce, a good question to ask is why. I know of women with small children who choose to stay home because it is more economically feasible than paying for childcare. Is that a choice? Yes. Does it answer the question about why it's the woman who stays home and not the father of the children? Absolutely not. Does it alter the economic status of the woman staying home? Does she still labor without pay, regardless of the reason?
I am familiar with these arguments and the economic "theory" of them but think they are largely misguided. If one takes the step to, should there be compensation for the mother's unpsid labor, who owes it? The wider society - as the advocates seem ot argue, or the spouse or partner? If it indeed is the wider society that owes it, does that mean mothers should be prepared to bargain in the marketplace? And should the market pay more for good work than not-so-good work, or feel free to fire those whose work really isn't good enough? I didn't think so.
3
@JChicago here is "familiar" with the "arguments". With the actual labor? Probably not. Would the market fire moms? Reveals your mindset that men are the supervisors and women are the (free) laborers.
Instead of "feel free to fire those whose work really isn't good enough" - stick with me - men could do it themselves. If men felt that their (currently free) services were not up to market standards, they could...do the laundry themselves.
"Arguments" from people who are "familiar" with how food gets on the table or how clean clothes appear in the closet or who is in charge of bedtime for the kids are tedious and false.
It's interesting to read the comments on here and see the gender divide. The point of the article is to show that societies would not only not function without the unpaid labour of women, but that the wealthy societies did not get that way without it. And before anyone says anything, yes of course men do unpaid labour in the home but even now in this so called modern age, it's still generally the "big stuff" (lawn mowing, snow shovelling, etc) - stuff that is not a day to day activity. In general (and of course there are always exceptions) the labour of the day to day tasks falls on women - whether they are working outside the home or not. This article also does not mention the emotional labour many women are also carrying - the strain of having to having to manage every aspect of the household (shopping, laundry, cleaning, cooking, kids, aging parents, pets, etc) and having everyone else's well being and their issues, at the forefront of your day - every day.
59
@Laurie
The male ire on this thread comes from the author's implication that women (not men) should be paid wages for previously unpaid work in the home. That the support of stay at home women by the working men is irrelevant.
For two income families, the issue is, as you say, the tendency for men to do less unpaid home work than women. That needs to be solved, and I am reasonably sure it is moving in that direction. But its going to take a long time.
I don't know how paying wages to the woman in the two earner household would work. Particularly if she does 5 hours and he does 2.5. Pay them both? Pay her the difference? Where does this pay come from?
The common fund comprised of both earners wages?
The issue is societal, not solvable by imposing the factory floor on a home.
3
@Laurie The table mentions six hours of unpaid work a day. That amounts to 42 hours/week, that's roughly a work week. The employed partner works as much, too. And in a good marriage, the income is split. So, where's the injustice, then? 😕
I don't doubt there's partnerships where women are exploited. I guess the problem is worst when the woman has a job, too, but has to care for the households and the kids on top of that. That's unfair and ought to change.
But the Oxfam story doesn't address such specific issues and paints the problem with too broad a brush. And especially the calculation is very questionable. That's annoying. The complex situation of gender inequality needs to be addressed in a more insightful way, cheap publicity stunts aren't helpful.
The focus on unpaid work is misguided and quite honestly, irrelevant. A few comments to put this article in context.
A few thousand years ago, when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers, all work by both men and women was unpaid. Was that good or bad?
Melania Trump isn't paid for her work. (Although the saying that someone who marries for money will be paying a high price has quite a bit of truth here.) Again, is that good or bad?
Is it better if I mow my own lawn (unpaid work) or hire a lawn service which allows me to work more overtime (paid work)?
7
@J. Waddell
It's not that the work is unpaid so much as it is that it is unacknowledged and unappreciated as the bedrock of all economic activity in any community. Those things that we do because they just need to get done (and no-one else is going to do them...) need to be recognized as the valuable contributions to our lives that they are. Since my husband retired and I haven't, he has taken over a lot of the day-to-day cleaning and cooking that I used to do all of. It's nice and I appreciate it that he now uses a small percentage of his free time (which is essentially all his time) to do what I did for decades while holding down a full-time job outside the home...
5
@J. Waddell Feel free to inform the Women in your family that their unpaid labor is "irrelevant". Feel free to take on Women's unpaid labor duties in your family for a day and experience how "irrelevant" it is.
3
As a stay at home mom, I find it very reductive to call what I do "unpaid labor", as if caring for my own home and children is some kind of burden that was forced upon me by the big bad Capitalist Patriarchy.
Does it ever occur to the chattering classes that a lot of American women... choose... this? And many of us even... like... it?
Not everything can be reduced to an economic analysis.
Also, a family unit is a single entity. My husband's money is my money. My money is his money. It all goes in the same pot. WE have the same financial interests and resources. WE are not unpaid.
47
@A F I think its relevant that so few men make the same choice and that making that choice puts the stay at home parent in a somewhat risky position financially. Yes your husbands money is your money but for many people that bet doesn't pan out because the marriage doesn't last and for others the paid spouse might exert more control in the relationship because of his status as "breadwinner". What about this set up makes it so unappealing to men, how can we make sure everyone choosing is actually choosing it from a variety of options, and how can we make it better for the people who do choose it?
23
@Elise The questions you raise are good ones, and some have ready answers. We should certainly have subsidized or free childcare for working mothers, either at their place of work or at convenient off site locations. We should certainly have significant child care credits in the tax code. Society needs well-raised kids. Making child rearing "paid work" is not the only way to get there.
5
@A F
Thank you. People seem to forget that a couple is a team and whatever it takes to make the family work and thrive is the utmost task at hand. Otherwise...don't get married or have children. I truly respect people that make those choices. They know themselves well.
12
I spent much of my early marriage away from my wife and the only child I will ever have. My wife, a brilliant molecular biologist, stays home now for health reasons and her own choice. She cleans, cooks, whatever she prefers. She is not exploited or unappreciated. I have the luxury for her to live the life she chooses because of the time away all those years ago....
5
@J Wilson Every part of this story is beautiful. Your appreciation for your wife, your sacrifice, her sacrifice, and the rest. Thanks for sharing.
1
I spent much of my early marriage away from my wife and the only child I will ever have. My wife, a brilliant molecular biologist, stays home now for health reasons and her own choice. She cleans, cooks, whatever she prefers. She is not exploited or unappreciated. I have the luxury for her to live the life she chooses because of the time away all those years ago....
1
So, I make a lot of money in my job, and my wife does not work "outside the home." She does a great job with house, kids, pets, and nonprofit stuff that we support together. In return, she gets half of the wealth that we have collectively. Why is she considered not to be paid for her work? There is no way I could do my job, and accumulate the wealth we have (which started, incidentally, at well below zero due to our collective student debt), without her doing her job.
7
Exactly. And what wages am I "losing" for tending to yard work, home maintenance, shuttling children, etc.? This seems to be a skewed measurement of wealth.
2
@Ralph This depends. If you would prefer to spend that time working, and have the opportunity, and your pay would be significantly more than you would pay someone for yardwork or kid shuffling, then you are indeed losing wages by allocating labor to these unpaid chores.
But it is hardly clear that an economic analysis captures what is at stake. Home maintenance is craft. Householders take pride in their skills, and take comfort in their security and freedom from pricey and unreliable tradesmen.
Economists may try to put a price on these things, but their analyses are reductive and miss important values.
@george
What does she pay in taxes for her "half of the wealth?" How much will she get in social security monthly when she hits 65? If she should find herself widowed or single before she retires, what will her unemployment checks look like? Did you understand what the article was trying to tell you?
4
The point of this article is not that men exploit women that are too mulish to comprehend it.
The point is that our economic systems impose burdens on non-employees, disproportionately women (i.e., the women providing unpaid labor so the employee can work).
However, since employees are free to leave for a better deal, I'm not sure it's correct to say that the employer isn't compensating their employee fully, including the impact on non-employee family members. Seems to me that if employment wasn't a positive for the family as a whole, the employee would quickly become a former employee.
It's important to remember that no one if legally compelled to be a wife, or to have children, or to accept employment, or to do housework. We all have to own our own decisions.
12
@Sam I Am
Men compel women to serve them. Men compel women to be wives, have children, not accept employment and do the housework. Girls have to be shown this truth from infancy. It's past time for us -- not you -- to own our decisions.
3
Why are you calling it "unpaid"? Some women live quite luxuriously and most live a very comfortable life as mothers or wives. In fact Manhattan's department stores and restaurants are filled with them on any given day. A someone that is overwhelmingly a man is working long hard days to subsidize this stuff. I find it deeply insulting that a person, man or woman sees everything through a constant gauge of men vs. the victim (women). How about personal choices and yes how life can dictate our individual destiny.
In the U.S., countless women never work a day in their lives relying on the crutch of social norms, happily so. When women speak of equality, they conveniently leave out the inequality of men when facing a judge, the complete lack of support or community when something goes awry at work or in finances. Men face a hard tough road and often alone. Women have no idea.
10
@MCS You're kidding, right?
2
You can't separate class from gender (as the Times also does with race and class). As a professional gay man, I and my single friends (male and female) watch my married friends, straight women and gay couples, benefit from high-earning husbands. They have homes and cars and good health insurance. Further, raising families provide rewards beyond money. While the United States must do better to help less economically advantaged families, especially with health care, elder care, and early childcare, at what point am I--and other hard-working childless men and women--subsidizing the choices people make to have children. and raise families.
4
@sansacr. Wait...you
When you are older, the generation after you provides most of your: physicians, nurses, grocery store clerks, pharmacists, white and blue collar workers.
You didn't personally sacrifice any time or money to feed, house, clothe, educate any of those people.
Yet, without them, you would die.
Who is providing and who is not?
My wife's labor is not "unpaid." It actually comes at quite a high cost to us.
My wife stands in for what it would cost to hire equivalent help. It is measured against what she might earn if she was working.
Ultimately, they both seem to equal out - meaning, all the intangibles of staying at home outweigh all the tangibles of earning a paycheck.
But her work is not "unpaid." It's simply accounted for internally - like cash moving from your left hand to your right hand.
21
Oh my goodness! I am having dejavu! I am sure this idea was discussed 50 years ago; sans the very fancy graphic. I have found in my career there were those who talked about something and those who did something.
Equal Work-Equal Pay-Equal Opportunities
Frankly I find this unpaid labor approach overstated and insulting.
2
My wife is a stay at home mom. However, while I work full time, I do 80% of the cooking and we use our kids to do many household chores. I do a lot of other stuff like home repairs, putting up shelves, hanging ceiling fans and fixtures, etc. On weekends we both run the kids around to their sporting events and stuff.
The key is, until I read this article, we didn’t “keep score”. We chose to marry each other and start a family and we are appreciative of what each of us brings to the household and do not have expectations nor do we take each other for granted. Since the kids were old enough to do chores, they get a steady diet of them which helps alleviate some of the “work”.
This has led to a happy marriage going on strong for 19 years - just celebrated our anniversary on 3/3/20. Look at that! I even remembered our anniversary. :)
17
When I worked full time as a physician, I had disability coverage. When I chose to stay home and raise my children for 10 years ( a luxury to be sure) I did not qualify for any disability. My husband observed that it would take 4 full time people to carry out the jobs I did at home, yet this has no monetary value in our society.
21
@Martha Dexter
More likely is that your husband doesn't understand how much you can actually get done in a home when you put your mind to it, so that any effort looks like an "extraordinary human achievement."
Work at home is work. Plenty of workers think that they're worth 4 of their coworkers, which is not unusual. So not unusual for your husband to think you're worth 4 domestic workers, given that he probably has no experience in domestic work.
4
@Martha Dexter. Is your point that a single Mom working two jobs to make ends meet should pay higher taxes so you can receive a government stipend to stay at home and raise your kids?
@Martha Dexter
If it was a bad choice, why did you choose it?
What the article doesn't address is the added expenses that come with working out of the home, and the effect on the family as an aggregate. Today, marriage is a team activity, not a plot to keep women out of the workforce. It's well known that working spouses, male or female, often pay more for child care, transportation, and other hidden expenses than they make. If you're going to raise kids, both parents have to sacrifice income one way or another.
4
I must be in the dark ages. I don't really understand.
- I thought that worth or value was based on supply/demand, and that value is based on what others are willing to pay.
- I don't know what they mean by unpaid labor. If I, or my wife, spends 2 hours making lasagna for our family and kids, is that "unpaid labor"? What if we don't consider it to be "labor"? And isn't spending time cooking better than buying fast food every night? That would reduce unpaid labor, I guess.
- If I spend 30 minutes cleaning my closet, is that unpaid labor?
- Why is gender parity the goal? What if gender parity leads to worse societal outcomes?
Personally, I think each family should figure out how to maximize their time for the betterment of self and family and community.
I have never presumed that I should get paid for basic aspects of living and maintaining a safe and secure household. Once you infer that people should get paid for this - that creates a negative incentive to engage in these activities [without pay]. And we know what happens when people think that the government owes them something.
20
@Brett Lane Do you have children? Anyone with kids can quote you a value of home labor instantly. I promise daycare costs have not broken economic theory: it is based on supply and demand. The cost of someone looking after my young child, five days a week, 8 hours a day, is about 60% of my after taxes income. My partner and I make approximately the same income. We can both work full time, and hire someone, and come out slightly ahead at the end of the month. Or one of us could stay home. In our metropolitan area, each of our jobs pays slightly above the median salary. So that means, for about 50% of families, staying home or working full time is a wash: all the money you make is spent on childcare. So why not stay home? For various reasons, women make the choice to stay home more often than men. Here's why it's interesting to calculate how much that labor is worth: when a woman stays home, two jobs that could exist are removed from the formal economy (the woman's job and the care-taker's job). If we are going to sustain 2-3% economic growth with below replacement birthrates, it is imperative to have public policy that subsidizes home care, so that more women can join the labor force.
25
@Brett Lane Why should gender parity not be the goal?
It is well proven that older women are much more exposed to the risk of poverty than men. This partly down to the pay gap but also its still overwhelmingly women who decide to go part time or work reduced hours or stayed at home to take care of children, household chores or elderly parents. Lower contribution to pensions means less income later on and with it fosters one-sided dependancies or loss of independence.
I agree that the definition of unpaid labour is difficult and of course everyone has to maintain a safe and secure household and that is just part of life. I guess unpaid labour starts when it prevents one partner from earning an independent income/pension/health care in order to enable the other person to go out and earn a 'family' income without the person staying at home receiving any of the benefits.
If one person earns an income and the other one stays at home covering work needing done at home such as raising children, caring for parents, managing the logistics of household but both enjoy equals pension and health care contributions, opportunities for wealth creation I think unpaid labour would not be an issue.
As is unpaid labour per see prevents the person undertaking it from creating independent funds to safe guard their own health and living standards. And overwhelmingly unpaid labour is carried out by women making it an tool for impoverishing women in their later stages of life.
6
@Allison Who will take care of the care-taker's children?
4
I had a very unique conversation in which a man was describing an incident of charity that didn't involve "work" or "money." His example was his wife baking a cake for a gift. But of course his wife spent money and applied labor to make this cake, and this man was just oblivious to this fact. Women are supposed to be so pure and above greedy financial interests, but what is wrong about wanting to make money and to view our own labor as having financial value? I don't want to be holier than thou, I want to receive compensation for my real work.
17
@Ge Receiving monetary value for real work requires that the work be exchanged with someone outside of your income pool. The labor that people do for themselves or their family is indeed valuable to that family unit. There is no value to me though, that someone does their laundry or their dishes. Additionally, the point of charity, as your story describes it, is to give without expectation of compensation. Otherwise, it’s a business arrangement.
1
If the partners in a marriage value and support one another, this arrangement can work. The problem comes when the unpaid work is not valued or appreciated. This may become much more apparent when a couple divorces. In the larger society, someone who earns a large salary is seen as being more important than a person who takes care of the children but there are many things more important than money.
29
Except of course that calculation is total nonsense and this story borders on misinformation. It's the definition of "fake news": a catchy headline that looks great when shared on Social Media, followed by skewed information. Why? Because very little (if any) of this labour is unpaid. Assuming traditional role distribution in the household (as this story does), the women in question pay neither rent, nor food or car insurance or leasing or insurance, et cetera. If both man and woman are to earn cash (rather than expense-free living), then both are to share living costs. The correct calculation would take the number calculated by Oxfam, then subtract the proportional share of all of these costs (50%, in the case of a working man and a stay-at-home woman). I don't know what the resulting number is, of course -- it may well still result in unpaid labor. Or it might not. Equality (of opportunity, as well as equal rights) is important; stories like this hurt the cause of women and stir the resentment of men. Finally, in suggesting that we are looking at a fundamental wrong, the story ignores the fact that many women in the western world prefer to stay home while many men prefer to work.
31
@M. S. That's an archaic calculation. In the U.S., the majority of women are working outside the home and contributing income as well as doing the work at home.
40
@M. S. Why not pay the women for their home labor, and then ask them to contribute their share of the mortgage? That seems fair. My housekeepers cost $30 per hour, and if a woman works 9 to 5 then they would earn $240 per day and $1680 per week. Out of this earning, then the women can pay for her share of the mortgage and other items.
9
@Ge Your comment assumes that women do not have purchasing power within marriages. Studies show that women typically have a lot of purchasing power. This may not be in the form of direct wage within a marriage but it’s disposable money none the less.
5
Not only do I think women world-wide should engage in more Long Fridays--and maybe some Long Saturdays and Sundays as well--but every so often they should pull the "full Lysistrata"
for, oh, maybe a week or so.
The world would stop dead. And maybe some compromises would be negotiated.
100
@Glenn Ribotsky
True. But the answer isn't turning everyone's household into a factory floor.
The answer is for men, particularly in two earner families, to pick up much more of the household chores.
5
Great article, but in our home, I'm the stay-at-home parent that does the cooking, cleaning, childcare, and laundry, because my wife works fulltime.
So while I recognize that women predominantly do the housework around the world, the article fails to recognize that sometimes the men do all the housework so their wives can pursue their careers.
20
@Mark Goodman sexist article.
@Mark Goodman Mark, thanks for the work you do as a stay-at-home parent. But this article isn't about you, and it doesn't need to be.
@Mark Goodman Not all men. Meh. Stop centering yourself and listen to the message of the article.
Unless I am misunderstanding this poorly written infographic, women spend 1.5 hours more per day working in the home than men. This invites questions about the article:
1) Men spend how many hours more or less than women working *outside* the home?
2) Why doesn't the article report the amount of *additional* value of labor performed by women? A little arithmetic based on the figures in the article tells us that American men would have made just under $1 trillion last year. Thus, unpaid labor by women is valued at only $500 billion more than unpaid labor by men.
3) The division of labor in the home is often unequal. Men use chemicals (pesticides, paints, dust, etc.), expose themselves to dangerous equipment (lawnmowers, power tools, ladders, etc.), and perform duties with a high risk of injury (heavy lifting, climbing, etc.).
15
@Edward, a Single Woman with kids: who do they propose will pay her?
So I suspect that the point of this is that a Woke candidate would promise, in addition to all the other free stuff, some sort a guaranteed income to stay at home moms thus, Bloomberg-like, buying their votes?
At some point Democrats are going to wake up to what the radicals in their party are doing and what follows won't be pretty.
9
So many of the commenters scoffing at the premise of the article seem to be assuming that The Family is a fixed and immutable unit, and that therefore both its paid and unpaid members reap the benefits of each other's labor. Maybe so -- until a divorce. Then the non-earner (usually a woman) suffers a precipitate drop in financial security, while generally still assuming the care burdens they'd shouldered before.
232
@Chris Society already recognizes this imbalance and accounts for it in divorces through alimony and child support.
8
@Chris That assumes a divorce which is beyond the scope of the article. Alimony is, in fact, supposed to be the reconciliation to continue, formally, the support provided informally.
The problem is that in a divorce, the creation of two households from one is very expensive, so overall standards of living must go down.
15
@Chris
I'm the main breadwinner, AND I do most of the household chores (including home repairs). I'm exhausted all. the. time.
I have been reading the news for 30 years and I cannot recall the last time I read an article that suggested that, in some small and specific way, men got the short end of the stick.
Now that women are 20%? 50%?90%? (the graph shows that the top 5 countries are pretty close to getting there) to achieving equality of opportunity in the west, can we have 5%, 10%, 20% of gender related articles written about how men and boys are unfairly treated in some realm of life?
Occupational injuries? Public schools? Incarceration rate?
15
@Chuck do you have any math to prove that there aren't already 5 10 or 20 percent of what you you're asking for
I don't know what specifically about public schools you mean, but the other two you mentioned I found these:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/opinion/sunday/prison-mass-incarceration-trump.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/21/opinion/first-step-american-incarceration.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/us-mass-incarceration-rate.html
https://www.bls.gov/regions/new-york-new-jersey/news-release/fatalworkinjuries_newyorkcity.htm
1
@Chuck Incarceration rates is because men do more harm to others (often women, but even more often other men). Should we commiserate?
2
@Elisabeth
So when men's outcome is unfavourable to them it is because they made decisions, but when women's outcome is unfavourable to them it is because there is discrimination, injustice, societal pressures, etc.
Typical main stream media take.
These measures fits into a larger picture. Measuring paid work has an impact on national economic enterprise and thus economic strength and finally national dominance. DJT wants the Fed to lower interest rates to goose the GDP so he can beat China while tarifffs weaken China so he can beat China (Economic Nationalism, very dangerous). But maybe we are looking at the wrong thing. The excess work by women is much higher in the low income countries, the ones where "happiness" or "satisfaction" is lower, and perhaps where the men and women have to scrabble to get paid work at exploitation wages, to support basic life.
The fact that much of our lifestyle is dependent on work in the nuclear family should make us realize how marginal and distorting paid work is. Happiness is not more motorcycles, boats, iPhones, big scree TVs or electronic gadgets, it is happy children, security and meaningful work that makes our homes more comfortable, and means to pursue interests that are not paid work, aka happiness. Perceived happiness, Security and satisfaction with lives should be measured, not GDP and measures of housework that isn't paid. This is another distortion of our perception of ourselves, where our system conflates happiness with consumption and debt.
10
A sweet deal for the American man. I took advantage of it. Had a wonderful career, two magnificent daughters. And lots of fun along the way. I always estimated my domestic wife's worth to be about $125K per year. I was always generous with money with her. But still believe I came out ahead.
8
@rich williams Are you deducting from your wife's "wages" half of the living expenses? I wonder if you do that if you still come out ahead.
@rich williams -
You probably did come out ahead. One more social burden to be overcome.
I'm a bit confused. Isn't the value of all of that labor consumed by the household itself? Paid labor is labor performed for others, sold in the marketplace. If someone is to pay me for housework or childcare, I'd have to be working in their house, and caring for their children.
17
Just think if you measured unpaid work done by men! All of the renovations, car repair, yard maintenance etc. Pretty sure it'd be in the quadrillions.
7
@Ryan Bingham
Calculating from the hours per day chart - a bit over two hours vs. four hours for women - it would be about $600,000,000,000, assuming the same rate of pay.
I won't get into whether yard work ought to pay more than child care.
9
@Ryan Bingham Well, they did that. The difference varied by country, but in every one women did more unpaid work than men. In the U.S. women averaged 4 hours of unpaid work to men's 2 and a half hours.
17
@Glassyeyed, Mechanics cost $120 per hour, lawn services average $50 etc.
5
So what’s the point? I’m a stay-at-home dad for two small children, and I accept that society massively undervalues the work that I do. Maybe women should do the same.
25
@Greg I believe women have... for eons! But why change things up - I mean, I myself, really don't like indoor plumbing, modern medicine, and sliced bread. Things should just always stay the same as they always were!
4
@Greg You are ignoring that this issue is PRIMARILY a women's issue. Anything that helps women ultimately helps men, children and society as a whole. Join us. We want you!
3
@Greg
The point is that we’re evil. We’re men! Everything that is wrong with the world is our fault. Are you white? Me too! Even worse. I’m ashamed to be alive. I mow the lawn, take out the garbage, do the dishes, vacuum, clean the bathrooms, do small maintenance, paint the porches, wall the dog, rake the leaves, water the garden, take the cars for service, do the grocery shopping, run most of the errands. But I’m a man, so that doesn’t count.
Shame on us, Greg! Shame on us!
(All the above is true, although this is really just a sarcastic rant. I couldn’t care less who does what. It needs to get done, and someone does it)
3
I assume these unpaid women are getting enough to eat and a home to live in. Is that not considered pay? As a child in the 1950s, the father went out and earned the necessary money and the mother took care of the house and young children. As the Bible teaches, when a man and woman marry they become " one flesh"-an individual. They are a team which forms the basis of the family.
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@Aaron Adams This piece is not solely focused on stay-at-home mothers. It includes unpaid labor women do on top of working part- and full-time jobs.
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@Aaron Adams
"and on top of their full-time jobs".
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@Aaron Adams What you are describing is the basis for slavery. It is super paternalistic. I don't like it one bit.
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Ha. My wife made more than I did, by default I was the soccer dad. My daughter doesn't want to be married or have children. What we witness is a cultural change offered by options that had never been availing to women- and it is their right to build lives that reflect their choices in life. Traditional society had defined gender roles that are being surmounted by education and advancing economies. Depending on how women choose to build a family relationship- if they do- then it is possible for them to wrest the time spent on 'unpaid chores'. Otherwise it's kinda been built into society, like since forever.
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@Victor Lacca No. It changed when men began engaging in wage labor with the rise of industry. Before that point, men, women and children all worked in the home.
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@Renee This raises the genteel image of the farm estate which has been portrayed as a bucolic ideal. Everyone working in the home is simply not practical. Suffice it to say NOBODY would want to endure the hardship and uncertainty of pre-industrial life where everyone except the elite had to scratch out a precarious life. Love it or hate it, industry has provided great wealth, albeit with less than optimal equity.
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@Renee
Well, if you regard farms or workshops as "home".
And even in those situations, men's work and women's work were well defined. A study of Iroquois culture illustrates this.
The simple fact is men are physically capable of more brute strength than women. That has partially defined the roles. Technology makes such distinctions much less important.
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Where does Iceland now fall on this chart? The equal pay law is great, but please show its affects on unpaid work differentials.
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I would like to see the US data normalized for age, educational attainment level, and income of level of the spouse. I would be surprised if 20 something educated women have the 2 to 1 disparity in hours in the US put forth in the article.
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@Chris I have a 4 year degree and work 40 hours a week. I spend just about every waking moment at home managing my children, folding laundry, cooking, sometimes doing dishes (my husband thankfully handles that often), washing and sterilizing bottles and pump parts, and of course all the fun tasks like cleaning litter boxes and bathrooms. I also mow the lawn on the weekends, and pressure wash, too, because I enjoy the time it allows me to be alone with my thoughts. I easily spend 4 hours per day doing household tasks. From 5am-6:45am while getting ready for work, and from 5:15pm to 8pm. I am so tired, I fall asleep at 8, sometimes 7, so I get no time to myself. I wake up at 5 on the weekends so I can have a quiet cup of coffee before everyone is up, but I usually am folding laundry then, too. And my husband is really helpful, he does his fair share when he is home in the evenings.
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@From a poor peanut town And from what I read, your husband is working more than 40 hours a week as week. That extra labor is what is paying for your work at home.
Two things that destroy women's autonomy and well-being are romantic partners and children. Both bring tremendous emotional and financial burdens to women. The best move for women is to remain legally single and childless with no legal and financial ties to anyone. That is how a woman gets ahead. Let men take care of themselves and raise children on their own. Hopefully, the global population will eventually start to decrease too.
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@June If that’s your view vis a vis children I sincerely hope you do not have any. Being alone and childless is certainly a choice, but not one I would wish to make.
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@June -
Easier said than done.
But I catch your drift. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool feminist, believe it or not.
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@June Same for men... children and spouses are expensive.
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My wife often makes the comment to me that as a stay at home mom, I owe her about $140k annually for the 18 years our daughter lived at home. Not sure how I would have paid her since it was more than I was making working full time and doing my share of the household tasks.
Women in the workplace should absolutely be earning equal pay for equal work and experience. But monetizing household tasks within the family home is impractical and another wonderful example of how we liberals are our own worst enemies. How many other sound bites can the NYTs dream up for the Trump campaign.
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@Bill P. Does anyone notice that only the men seem to have a problem with the idea that unpaid women's work should be monetized?
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@Andrea You seem to be driving his point home. Any male commenter on here will immediately be seized upon as "part of the problem" if he disagrees with the author's premise.
Personally, I have no problem showing my appreciation for my partner (soon-to-be-wife) who DOES indeed handle many of the household responsibilities mentioned in this article. But to suppose equating this with "unpaid labor" I think does a gross disservice to anyone who lives independently--male OR female, who does all of this alone. Is it unpaid labor when I handle our taxes instead of hiring an accountant? Is it unpaid labor when I re-stain the deck or attend to landscaping duties rather than outsourcing it? Is it unpaid labor when I tidy up the house or repair appliances myself? This article is intentionally divisive in nature, which is what I take umbrage with. My partner and I share responsibilities and handle obstacles in a balanced way--for which the minutiae is far more complex than any spreadsheet or data points can evaluate like this article attempts to.
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@Bill P. unless she can prove nannies make $140k and up, you can ignore that bogus number. And charge her - and your daughter - rent retroactively. How nice is your house and hence what rent would you charge?
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So I'm justified to shake-down my elderly parents when I drive to help them?
So I should have indemnified from the womb for all the work and benefits I received by being raised to adult-hood?
Not that it isn't an issue, it's just not simple
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@JPB -
Nothing is simple. The greatest workforce predators against women often are other women — HR executives.
Go figure.
I wonder what tasks the study includes in unpaid labor.
In our household, it included childcare - we had the luxury of being able to afford to raise our kids at home - which was intensive hours in the early years, less so as they aged.
But we also had other unpaid work - cleaning, laundry, cooking, shopping, gardening, yard work, care maintenance, house maintenance, home improvement, bill paying, tax prep, FAFSA prep and management, and scores of little jobs done frequently that we split based on who had time, skills and temperament to handle them.
The hours we about even.
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Capitalism could not exist without the unpaid exploitation of billions of women -- and the low-paid exploitation of many millions more who provide essential, but undervalued, services to their communities. The statistics bear this out: cut-throat, neo-liberal capitalist nations enjoy significantly lower gender parity. Not coincidentally, these nations also are highest in income inequality, with economic power concentrated in tiny elites.
Which nations enjoy the greatest gender parity? Those which lean towards heavily socialized economies, with strong safety nets and protection for worker's rights, and more equal distribution of wealth. The evidence is clear: No equality for women without socialism. Capitalism in its present form must be abolished.
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@ando arike i agree w/ your overall assessment of the profound harm of capitalism-without-safety-net, and that the harm disproportionately falls on women. However, it is worth pointing out that the bottom ranking countries India and Mexico are also liberal socialist states, with policies similar to the Scandinavian states at the top of the rankings. Its not apples to apples as the former are very large heterogeneous countries w/ more internal inequality but it makes me think the economic policy is necessary but not sufficient-- countering cultural mysogyny, expectations, and gender equity policy (civil rights) must also go hand in hand to achieve justice.
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@ando arike
So, I need to pay my stay at home wife wages?
Does that then absolve me of being the sole payer of the household expenses?
With my wife taking part of her wages to contribute to the expenses?
Do you see such arrangements actually working?
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@Jerseytime
Did I say that you need to pay your wife? Why are you putting words in my mouth?
What I'm saying is that capitalism as we know it is based on exploitation of the working class that requires women to perform many essential services for free.
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This is shoddy logic.
It's weaponizing data from traditionally structured families into identity politics outrage.
Whilst I'm not an advocate, in traditional families women often do more unpaid work, men do more paid work, and they share the financial benefits of his work and the nurturing and familial benefits of hers.
It would be equally unhelpful to make the case that the portion of a breadwinner's salary/time spent supporting their spouse and kids is "unpaid labour" as they don't receive the financial output of their time. But that would be a bad take, and so was this article's.
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@Pete N’s logic is far more insightful and well-rounded than the authors’. Ultimately, the shared benefits of paid earnings cannot be ignored, just like the social and emotional costs of time spent away from family if the paid earner preferred that instead of working. Shoddy logic regardless of gender roles in each situation.
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@Pete N
1. An important question is who controls the finances in the family. If women control the finances then they control their husband's salary. In many families this is the case.
2. It is also important to remember the importance of choice. If women are choosing to do unpaid work in exchange for something else, than this has to be included in the analysis. Many women would rather take time off to raise young children than work, at least for some period of time.
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@Pete N It's actually less "shoddy" logic than you say. The article factors in unpaid labor that women execute on top of their outside work (in the U.S., 70% of mothers work). The traditional breadwinner husband and stay at home wife is no longer the "norm" in America (also, a larger portion of marriages now end in divorce). Furthermore, you don't give any facts to support your position that men do more paid work. You fail to acknowledge the impediments that women face in their career growth because of their gender and motherhood. The article is meant to illustrate the undervaluation of women's work, which it accomplishes.
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Seriously, I'm not impressed with this argument. Why not monetize everything? Dads volunteering to coach games, Priests, ministers and Rabbis offering free counsel to their members. How about teachers and doctors and even lawyers who do uncompensated work?
This all sounds like a scheme to raise taxes to subsidize private unpaid labor. It sounds great when one considers that people work and sacrifice for their families without compensation. But then when the public policy proposals end up taxing productive individuals to pay for this, reality finds a way of intruding. Denmark is considered a model of a humane form of capitalism that the U.S. should emulate. They offer a social safety net we can only envy. But the price tag is very steep. The tax rate on income above 65,000 a year is about 56 percent. Not for just ultra high net worth individuals but for everyone, average workers included. How high do you want your taxes to go to pay women and others for private labor?
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@Yankelnevich "It sounds great when one considers that people work and sacrifice for their families without compensation. But then when the public policy proposals end up taxing productive individuals to pay for this..."
So you're saying that the people who work and sacrifice for their families are not productive individuals? Why do you consider them to be unproductive?
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@Glassyeyed Taking care of children is productive and essential. I just don't think it is in the public interest to monetize that labor.
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@Yankelnevich Why is that? It's labor. Should day-care workers be unpaid?
I would not broadcast this fact too loud because maybe the government will decide to tax it.
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This idea of how many dollars unpaid labor is "worth" crops up from time to time but is fundamentally nonsensical. The problem is that we know this unpaid labor generally is not worth minimum wage to do. How do we know? Because we can hire people to do these things but most of the time we don't. It's not worth it to do so.
I'm a single guy and I could hire someone to do my cleaning and my cooking and many household tasks, but I don't, because it's not worth it to me to do so. Most families feel the same way - if household tasks don't get done, they wait or it just doesn't get done - you don't hire someone to do it.
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@Big Cow —but you probably do, on some levels: Uber eats, or ordering pizza is outsourcing meal prep; There are similar trade offs.
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@Big Cow I disagree, unless by it's not "worth it," you mean they can't afford it. I believe many people would gladly hire others to do the cooking and cleaning and other household tasksi if it didn't put a strain on their budgets. What percentage of the one percent do you suppose do all the household tasks themselves?
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@Big Cow Just because you’re not in that market doesn’t mean there is no market, and therefore no price.
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And even is this study, the unpaid work women do is evaluated at Minimum wage. So even a study which is trying to value women's work, can only value it at the minimum. Would it not be more correct to apply either the average or median wage and not the minimum?
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@Margaret
For better or worse, household chore type work, and even child care, is usually paid at or close to the minimum wage in the economy.
But what about the article's premise itself? In cases where the woman stays home and the man works, should the woman be paid wages? What about the man's pay having paid for the food, housing, clothing and healthcare before this?
And if he pays his wife wages, is she now required to take some of those to contribute to the expenses?
Should every family hire an HR person?
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@Jerseytime : in a legal sense...all wages earned by both parties in a MARRIAGE belong equally to BOTH PARTIES.
If your total household income is $100K, then you each "own" $50K of that -- whether you each earn $50K at your jobs, or one person earns $80K and the other earns $20K.
People who cannot share, and who micromanage or micro-document "who does what" ... can't be married. They are too selfish and immature.
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Men do unpaid labor as well. They cut the grass, they rake the leaves, they do repairs around the house.
And there are many women that have to work outside the house and do the housework after they finish their regular jobs.
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@esp The study takes men's labor into account - on the bar chart the yellow dots are how much time men spend on household tasks, such as the ones you describe.
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@esp All tasks that are substantially less time consuming, infinitely more rewarding, more acknowledged and less chronic than things like loading a dishwasher (endless and thankless), cooking meals (endless but usually acknowledged) and minding sick children (rewarding-ish but an assumption that my time is less valuable).
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@Kas The ones we do like car maintenance are worth $100 per hour, the lawn service is roughly $50 per hour-- get it?
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The "Long Friday" could be viewed as a market force test. What does your partner really value? I'm very active around the house and when challenged, I offer my wife the opportunity to get up early and plow the drive. The equation needs more than a measure of time. Skills developed over a lifetime(the truck won't start), misery(-5F, windy, in the dark), risk(getting stuck-see misery). My wife hates the vacuum but has never accepted the offer of a trade. I truly appreciate what she does, but when I look down from an extension ladder and as she boasts about having painted the lower 6 feet of the house, I don't feel guilty.
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@Droid05680 : in a good, loving marriage....each partner brings their own skill set and work, and the work done in the HOME (for their own mutual benefit) IS NOT PAID!
My husband painted our deck last year -- I hate painting! -- nobody "paid him" to do this. He took out piles of trash and cat litter last night, in the pouring (freezing) winter rain. Nobody paid him for that.
When our water heater leaked, and we needed a new one -- in the dead of winter -- he took it out, went to get a new one, installed the new one -- cleaned up the awful mess (30 gallons of water all over the basement, soaking everything) -- took the old water heater to the city dump (the garbage men won't take them). I tried to help, but I don't know much about plumbing. Should I have paid him? A real plumber quoted us $1400 for this job.
I do a TON of stuff around our house, and he knows it, and (mostly) appreciates it. We BOTH do a ton of work here, and a megaton to raise our kids (now adults). We don't resent each other's roles, nor do we denigrate each other's labor.
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The last time I looked, 97% of male corporate managers were married vs. 40% of female corporate managers. One interpretation of this would be that when women achieve economic independence by their own ability, they are less likely to marry. Of course, pay equity for these women still lags significantly.
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@EJ Another interpretation is that having a wife to relieve them of domestic duties and child care, these male corporate managers were free to pursue their careers without any household hindrances. Women, on the other hand, are largely the ones who juggle the universe of what traditionally has been seen as women's work. Try staying up with a sick child, finding someone to cover after school activities, pack lunches, plan meals and all that - while putting in the long hours and hard work required for climbing the corporate ladder. It's exhausting.
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@EJ Another interpretation is that female corporate managers are less likely to find a man who wants to be a full time homemakers than male managers are to find a woman who does. Sarah Silverman has said that she'd definitely have gotten married and had kids if she could have a "wife" - no man she met wanted to stay home with the kids while she worked/toured. Women have made a lot more progress is broadening their possible roles than men have.
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Unpaid labor in the household only has value inside the household. There is no real world valuation of it. The $10.9 billion does not exist. In fact, unpaid labor shrinks the economy as opposed to expanding it. It’s an economic reality however. Most of us cannot afford to pay someone to clean our houses or do other things that people do within their own households for free.
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@John not true. Unpaid labor includes the laundry that gives you clean clothes you wear to work and supplier of the hygiene products you use to appear presentable and employable. So this unpaid labor does have monetary value outside of the home.
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@John
Most can't afford to pay someone…because it HAS A VALUE.
And gee, if my unpaid labor is shrinking the economy, well, amen, I'm gonna quit doing it all!
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@John so, a clean house, a stocked kitchen, a well-fed, clothed, nourished family has no value outside the household? I disagree
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All wage labor includes an unpaid portion capital gets for free, it’s called profit.
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@Caleb Considine This reflects a basic understanding about capital. Capital has a cost whether you choose to believe it or not,
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