Section 3: Background – Women’s Work is Undervalued

One night after dinner my mother, father and I sat laughing and joking at the kitchen table. Somehow we came upon the topic of women’s work. For eighteen years my mother stayed home full-time to raise four children while my father worked six days a week to support the family. Now that my siblings and I are grown, my mother has a full-time paying job. She still comes home after an eight-hour shift to cook and clean. Both in good fun and serious debate, we argued about the value of women’s work. My father defended himself as the provider. My mother asked for pay. We dug through a drawer and pulled out a calculator. In just a few minutes we had calculated my mothers worth. My father owed my mother approximately $3.5 million for cooking, housekeeping and raising children. My father was a good sport, but you could see he was a little annoyed. We appreciated his hard work and sacrifice but society recognizes his contribution. My mother’s unpaid work was taken for granted and she is tired of being the invisible housewife. My mother’s eyes glowed with excitement as she looked at the numbers on the calculator. I could feel her pride. We recalculated the value of her work using different numbers – high and low estimates. My mother was excited by the idea that if she was paid for just some of the care work she has done her pockets would overflow. Several months later I continued to think about my mother’s ad hoc billing session. Such a simple process was so powerful. My mother’s demeanor and sense of self seemed strengthened by viewing a few numbers on an lcd screen. My organizer’s intuition kicked in. I felt like we had stumbled onto something with immense potential. I assumed many women who share my mother’s experience. They must understand what it means to have their work devalued or completely ignored. This radical approach seemed to have the capacity to demonstrate a connection between personal and political and perhaps lead to women-friendly political change. Feminist economists Marilyn Waring and Nancy Folbre have presented significant evidence that demonstrates standard economic measures devalue women’s contributions to society. Economic measures are often used to gage the general well being of a society. In the scope of economic practice, women’s unpaid work is assumed worthless because no dollar value is assigned to their work. Waring and Folbre’s research demonstrates my mother’s personal experiences are grounded in larger theoretical economic frameworks. Standard economic measures support institutionalized gender-bias. This project’s implementation is built upon the works of Waring and Folbre. They advocate the use of time use methodologies in economics as a means of attributing value to women’s work. This project modifies standard time-use methodologies in order to provide women an opportunity to attribute value to their unpaid work. To understand this project’s implementation strategy it is helpful to have some knowledge of how women’s work is systematically devalued by the absence of official economic measures of nonmarket (unpaid) work. The remainder of this section provides valuable background in key economic theories and methodologies. 3.1 Feminist Critiques of the Exclusion of Nonmarket Work Measures Standard economic measures in the United States, and most other nations represented at the United Nations (UN), do not include official measures of nonmarket (unpaid) work. Instead, only activities that produce cash flow (market work) are documented and measured. Nonmarket work has traditionally been excluded because it is considered a moral responsibility rather than a calculated exchange [7].” Feminist activists and feminist economists argue excluding measures of women’s unpaid work is a systematic way to devalue women’s contributions to society. Conversely, it is a way to overemphasize the contributions of men who traditionally perform work within the market framework. Gender bias in economic measures is particularly alarming because of the important role they hold in formulating public policy. Decision-makers and the general public view the GDP and other official measures of market work as indicators of well being. However, without any official measure of nonmarket work current economic indicators give an incomplete, inaccurate picture of well-being as it does not account for a significant amount of work performed by 50% of the population. As public policies are developed under faulty assumptions and incomplete data it is reasonable to conclude that better policy decisions could be made with more complete and accurate information. Many economists argue that exclusion of nonmarket work from economic accounts is due to the difficulty in estimating its value. However, “this is hardly a credible explanation, given the guesswork involved in imputing the value of other components of GDP [7].” There has been a rising political drive to measure nonmarket work with the understanding that a lower-bound measure can be calculated with time-use methodologies. 3.2 Political Justification for the Measure of Unpaid Work The most recent and significant political impetus to measure women’s unpaid work came from the United Nations Development Programme’s 1995 Human Development Report. The report examines the “growing inequality of opportunity between people and among nations [8].” It was released before the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China. It asserts, “Investing in women’s capabilities and empowering them to exercise their choices is not only valuable in itself but it is also the surest way to contribute to economic growth and overall development [8].” These findings later supported the passage of the Beijing conference’s Platform for Action that asks governments and the international community to “take strategic action” in “critical areas of concern,” including “inequality in economic structures and policies, in all forms of productive activities and in access to resources [9].” Under the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action’s section on Institutional Mechanism for the Advancement of Women, strategic objective H.3, item 206 asks “national, regional and international statistical services and relevant governmental and United Nations agencies, in cooperation with research and documentation organizations” to “generate and disseminate gender-disaggregated data and information for planning and evaluation [10].” This call-to-action has led to local efforts to document women’s nonmarket work and work towards valuing women’s unpaid work. In part, this project is a response to that call.