Unpaid Work

A Gender Issue and a Value Issue

Unpaid work is seen as a gender issue for two main reasons. First, it is much more likely to be performed by women than by men. Second, the tasks involved are widely seen as natural for women to do, and as such, require no compensation; therefore, the economic worth of the activities are obscured. This both devalues care work and domestic services and perpetuates inequality. Doing unpaid work is costly to provide, to the extent that women's commitment to unpaid work shapes how much time they have available for paid work in the labor market. Their circumscribed market opportunities can in turn lower their status and bargaining power within the home, and disadvantage results. Unpaid work imposes a substantial time impost upon women, which throughout their life cycle, transfers unrecorded subsidies to households, markets, and governments. Some argue that it is therefore important to put an economic value on unpaid work, and that the unpaid economy should be accounted for as part of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of each nation. This would give visibility to unpaid work in official figures, and formally recognize its value.

However, precisely defining what “work” is can be difficult. A standard yardstick is the third party criterion, which is that an activity should be counted as work if someone else can be paid to do it without losing the benefit of the activity. For example, someone else could be paid to cook a meal, but not to eat it for someone else. Therefore, cooking is work, but eating is not. Unpaid care work, which includes childcare, eldercare, and care of the sick and permanently ill or disabled, does not precisely meet this criterion, as a personal relationship is to some extent intrinsic to the task. Nonetheless, unpaid care work is a very important subset of unpaid work.

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