To Pay or Not To Pay, That is The Question

There isn’t much that remains unsaid when it comes to unpaid domestic work and the disproportionate weight it places on women.

Women take on the lion’s share of childcare, caring for the sick and elderly, routine household chores like cleaning and cooking, as well as work that is more particular to lower income societies – fetching firewood and water, and subsistence farming. They typically engage in 2.5 times more unpaid work than men do, and this number was only amplified during the pandemic-induced lockdowns. Moreover, this is true even for the most gender-equal societies, as demonstrated in the chart below.

(OECD data, Euronews, 2023)

Put together, this means that three-quarters of the world’s unpaid work is carried out by women, who dedicate an average of four hours and 25 minutes a day, as opposed to the men’s average of one hour and 23 minutes. This comes up to an additional four years in unpaid work, as calculated by ActionAid in 2016.

In low and middle-income countries, unpaid domestic work is frequently relegated to low-value status and is practically invisible in mainstream economics. Deep-rooted patriarchal institutions and mindsets have resulted in the sidelining of women’s contributions to the economy; they find no mention at all in national accounting systems. And yet, unpaid household work is estimated to be somewhere between 10% and 39% of GDP, and can possibly exceed the contributions of manufacturing, commerce and transportation depending on the economy in question. Not to mention that women are paid far less than their male counterparts with the same experience and qualifications – a subject of frequent study in the social sciences. Just in the EU, where “equal pay for equal work” is a founding principle, women earn 13% less than men on average.

The implications of these disparities are manifold. Given the limited number of hours in a day, women have much less time to engage in paid labour. Crucially, the work that women do at home does subsidize the cost of care, but this is not recognized as productive work. Women sustain families, fill in for social services and greatly support the economy, but the formal definition of work explicitly excludes all of this.

It’s a vicious cycle, really. Employers believe that women are predisposed to spending more time on housework and care-work than men, thereby spending fewer productive hours in the workplace. This statistical discrimination at the industry and firm level leads to women being paid less. The subsequent negotiations at the household level – who exits the workforce to run the house – almost always restricts women to the domestic sphere. It’s simply the more efficient choice, after all. The beliefs of employers are thus reinforced, and the cycle continues. And hence, they stay at home, all the while implicitly contributing to the household’s finances – contributions that go completely unaccounted for.

So yes, developing countries have made strides in terms of paternity leave. Yes, female attainment of secondary education surpasses that of men. But the differences at home remain vast as ever, particularly in developing countries, as highlighted below using World Bank data. women tend to spend nearly 16% of their time on unpaid care and domestic work, this number seldom exceeds 6% for men in most African countries.

(World Bank Data)

The larger question now is – what do we do about it? This article specifically aims to lay out the debate around monetary compensation for otherwise unpaid household work. We know the extent of unpaid household work done and the weight it carries, by virtue of time-use surveys and imputation using the market value of services and the system of national accounts. Now, does treating it the same way as paid labour present a viable next step? Put very simply, compensation for household work would come from taxes and potentially be carried out in the form of exemptions and rebates.

Let’s begin with arguments in favour of such an institution.

Firstly, economic empowerment. Monetary compensation for household work would lead us to re-evaluate what it means to be the ‘breadwinner’. Homemakers would also be able to engage in the social architecture in a different way, now possessing a position of economic power. Additionally, one could argue that all this system would do is provide an option for those who wish not to enter the formal workforce. Indeed, they will have financial freedom regardless of their position in the workforce-out of workforce nexus. They might be able to pursue higher education, perhaps, or invest time in accruing skills with higher payoffs.

And now, the other edge of the sword.

Home-keeping, for the most part, is seen as being done voluntarily – and the remuneration, so to speak, is in the form of, say, a healthy family unit.  Moreover, monetizing care work with the aim of accounting for it essentially reasserts the notion that the value of an individual is wholly economic, and that the system of national accounts is the only legitimate way of accounting for them. The impact of such a rhetoric is manifold because what about the fact that private sector professionals will also make far more than their at-home counterparts? Are they then just of greater value to society? And a third potential outcome is that there will be more of an impetus, particularly in more traditional societies, for women to conform to the norms of old and stay at home.

Of course, there is much that hasn’t been explicated here – we haven’t delved into the numbers game or the social engineering elements that will come into play. Nevertheless, some food for thought. But then who makes the food and what do they get in return for it?

References:

• “Redistribute unpaid work”, UN Women, https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/redistribute-unpaid-work
• Duboust, O. (2023), “Working for nothing: How unpaid labour shapes women’s professional lives”, Euronews, https://www.euronews.com/business/2023/11/08/working-for-nothing-how-unpaid-labour-shapes-womens-professional-lives (first chart)
• Seedat, S. & Rondon, M. (2021), “Women’s wellbeing and the burden of unpaid work”, The British Medical Journal, https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1972
• “Unpaid care and domestic work”, ActionAid, https://www.actionaid.org.uk/our-work/womens-economic-rights/unpaid-care-and-domestic-work
• Mitra, S. & Mehta, S. K. (2021), “It’s time to compensate women’s unpaid labour”, India Development Review, https://idronline.org/its-time-to-compensate-womens-unpaid-labour/
• Ven, P. V. D. & Queljoe, M. D. (2018), “Including unpaid household activities: An estimate of its impact on macro-economic indicators in the G7 economies and the way forward”, OECD Statistics and Data Directorate, https://associazionedomina.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/2018-Including-unpaid-household-activities-OECD.pdf
• “This house believes that housewives should be paid for their work” (2022). iDebate, https://idebate.net/this-house-believes-that-housewives-should-be-paid-for-their-work~b1087/
• “Gender Divide: Unpaid Care and Domestic Work Across Africa” (2024), World Bank, https://www.worldbank.org/en/data/interactive/2024/03/11/gender-divide-unpaid-care-and-domestic-work-across-afe-afw-africa (second chart)