Why is mothering so undervalued….by society….and by ourselves?
Just a mum… How often have you said that about yourself or perhaps about another woman? Many women who stay home and raise their children often report feeling underappreciated by their partners and society. Why does it feel that society belittles what must surely be one of the world’s most challenging jobs? Is there anything we can do to change the narrative?
Does our economy have a problem with women?
We must first examine how we measure our economy and its limitations to answer this question. The Bank of England tells us that gross domestic product, or GDP, is a measure of the size and health of a country’s economy over a period of time (usually one quarter or one year).
According to the BBC, you measure GDP in three ways:
- Output measure: This is the total value of the goods and services produced by all sectors of the economy: agriculture, manufacturing, energy, construction, the service sector and government.
- Expenditure measure: The value of the goods and services bought by households and governments, as well as investment in machinery and buildings. This also includes the value of exports minus imports.
- Income measure: The value of the income generated primarily in terms of profits and wages.
There is, therefore, a glaring omission from the data, namely, unpaid work (mostly by women) undertaken within their homes and communities.
Why was ‘women’s work’ excluded from our GDP?
During the Second World War, James Meade and his colleague Richard Stone developed a framework for measuring the economy. According to Diane Coyle, a professor at Cambridge University, the government tasked Meade and Stone with calculating how much output could be produced and what consumption would need to be sacrificed to ensure enough was available to support the war effort. Like many statisticians, Meade and Stone chose only to measure the value of bought and sold goods. It took a female assistant to join them in 1941 to point out a problem with their calculations.
In their paper How Women’s Unpaid Work Was Nearly Included in GDP Calculations, the New Humanitarian tells us that Meade and Stone hired 23-year-old Phyllis Deane in 1941 to apply their method in a few British colonies. In present-day Malawi and Zambia, Deane realised that it was an error to exclude unpaid household labour from GDP.
Deane could see that excluding unpaid work meant you could not accurately measure productivity. She argued that unpaid work was only excluded from the data because it was ‘women’s work’. Deane spent months working out a formula to measure the unpaid work women did. According to Luke Messac, writing in the HuffPost, Deane concluded that if governments wanted to formulate policies that increased aggregate national income and ensured an equitable distribution of that aggregate, the contributions of all producers — including rural women — had to be counted.
Stone, unfortunately, ignored Deane’s suggestions. In 1953, the first detailed standards for producing GDP were published. They excluded unpaid output.
Over the past seven decades, there have been frequent calls for unpaid labour to be economically quantified. It seems perfectly obvious that without someone (and unfortunately, it still tends to be a woman) picking up the slack at home—cooking, cleaning, and looking after children, for example—there would be no ‘male’ economy to measure at all.
In the book Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez, Perez argues that excluding women from data produces completely inaccurate results. The post-war economic boom masks the fact that due to more women working, increasing household tasks were outsourced – women started buying pre-prepared food, for example, rather than cooking from scratch and purchasing rather than making new clothes. Perez argues that productivity hadn’t actually gone up. It had just shifted from the invisibility of the feminised private sphere to the sphere that counts: the male-dominated public sphere.
But how do we measure something unpaid, and why should we?
How can we measure our unpaid economy, and why does it matter for female equality?
In November 2020, the BBC investigated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on the genders within the home. Their report, Coronavirus and gender: More chores for women set back gains in equality, tells us that even before the pandemic, women were doing about 1.8 times more unpaid work than men. Coronavirus has pushed that figure up even higher. The report itself makes for depressing reading, but, and this is a big but, surveys such as these make it much easier to calculate the invisible work done by women. You can use these calculations to measure our unpaid economy. If governments choose to do so (and they are fast running out of excuses), ‘women’s work’ can (and should) be measured for GDP purposes.
Some work is now being done to calculate the size of our unpaid economy. The Office for National Statistics regularly produces Satellite Accounts. These accounts cover economic activities but are not part of our core accounts. In 2018, they published a Satellite Account to estimate the output of our unpaid economy. For the years 2015 – 2016 (the last set of accounts I could find), the ONS estimated our unpaid economy was worth £1.24 trillion – larger than the UK’s non-financial corporation sector. Overall, unpaid household labour was equivalent to 63.1% of the gross domestic product (GDP).
According to Melinda Gates, if you hired women at the same market rate to do all the work women do, unpaid work would be the biggest sector in the global economy.
People tell us that being a parent is ‘the most important job in the world’. If governments truly valued parents’ contributions to raising the next generation, they would put a price on the work of stay-at-home parents and other carers in society.
We believe that we live in an equal society. The government must prove this by measuring ALL our paid and unpaid outputs and including the ONS’ satellite accounts for the unpaid economy in the official GDP calculations. By doing this, they signal the value they place on the unpaid work that takes place in homes and communities across the country. This will filter down to the rest of society. Stay-at-home mothers and other individuals who cannot undertake paid work for whatever reason will be able to take real pride in their contribution to society.
We all want to feel appreciated – our unpaid workforce is no different. Feeling underappreciated can lead to a loss of confidence and a sense of being overlooked. If there is one thing the COVID pandemic has taught us, it is how much we rely on one another to keep our society going and that we all deserve a seat at the table.
What do you think about including our unpaid output in our GDP figures? Is it workable? Would it lead to greater equality in society? Please let me know. I would love to hear your thoughts.