Achieving Gender Equality Requires Sharing Unpaid Labor Equitably
Caring for others is important work and we should measure it's value. But showing it's value doesn't mean women should have to do it all.
I think it’s fair to say I’m obsessed with women’s workforce participation rate. I think about it, I research it, I talk about it, I write about it.
When I posted a chart showing the 30-year stall in women’s participation in the paid workforce on LinkedIn, Rosalie Loewen, an economist at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies asked “I wonder if we are caring about all the right metrics. Can we add some metrics that value the work that women do outside of the paid labor force as well?”
This is a great question. The work women do when they aren’t working for pay does have value. It’s the work that makes the rest of the work possible!
For a great, and very readable, book on the value of domestic labor, check out Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? Spoiler alert: it was not him. Not surprisingly the work that went into keeping him fed and clothed, which was done by his mom, didn’t make it into his economic calculations.
Adding unpaid domestic labor into calculations of economic output is arguably the first step to showing it’s value. The good news is that conversations are starting to bubble up in policy circles about how to measure and value care work.
Just last week – ahead of Mother's Day – Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) “requesting that the agency conduct an inquiry about the contributions women’s unpaid care and domestic and reproductive work make to the national economy.”
And the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently commissioned a study on integrating nonmarket data in its Consumer Expenditure Survey. Today, if a family pays a nanny to care for a child, that expense shows up in household spending. But if that same family has a mom providing full-time care for that child, that work doesn’t show up as spending – making it seem “free.”
I applaud these efforts. We should do more studies on the economic impact of care work with a goal toward creating public policies to value both unpaid and paid care work and protect women from the financial impacts of providing care.
But I also believe care is work that should be shared equitably. To put a finer point on it: I don’t believe women should have to do all the care work. Not because it’s seen as less valuable. Because I think there is value in women doing other work! And I think there’s ample evidence that women don’t want to do it all.
I’m not obsessed with how many women work as corporate cogs because I’m on a mission to provide Capital with more Labor to fuel the Machine of Production. There are a million things wrong with the U.S. obsession with work and the judgements we make about who should and should not work and how they should or should not work. (Fans of “The Good Place” may recall Tahani’s insightful quote “Jason didn't even have a job! In a sad way, not in the good, rich way.”)
My mission is gender equality and freedom. When women who want to participate in the paid labor force can’t, it holds back gender equality at both the micro level (the material conditions and accomplishments of individual women) and the macro level (women’s collective access to power and resources). And that’s why I focus on the labor force participation rate — because my analysis of the data tells me that the current rate reflects a lack of support for women to do the kinds of work they want to do. So I want men to do more care work so that women can do other work.
I also want more men to participate in care work because it’s value isn’t only economic! Children benefit when they are cared for by men and women. Also: it brings joy and meaning to our lives. Men sometimes regret what they miss out on because society tells them to focus on paid work to the exclusion of caring for others. When men care – for children, parents, siblings – they enrich their own lives while also making space for their wives and mothers and sisters to do other kinds of work.
We could measure the value of unpaid care work, show its economic impact, and create policies protect family caregivers from financial ruin. But without also making a concerted effort to share care work equitably, women would still do a disproportionate share of it. In fact, without a concerted effort to recognize the need for gender equity in providing care, some policies could lead to more women being pushed out of paid work.
I want to live in a world where all genders care – for pay, for love, for their own emotional fulfillment and sense of purpose. I also want to live in a world where all genders lead, and make art, and make money, and make laws.