A census question on unpaid work
/In the census tonight, I found this question interesting and relevant, given it is International Women’s Day on 8 March.
In the last 4 weeks, which of these have you done, without pay?
The question is designed to calculate the sorts of work that people (predominantly women) do without earning money.
In the last census in 2018 I would have ticked one of these boxes but today, there were two:
Household work, cooking, repairs, gardening etc for my household
Looked after a child, who is a member of my household.
It’s been said that if we were to correctly calculate GDP, we would include all forms of work, not just paid. Unpaid care and domestic labour could be between 10%-40% of GDP (OECD forum).
I think about the incredible number of hours that women put in every week. Whether it’s working in the home, being paid for work, childcare, or life admin, women contribute ALOT.
As an example, taking children to extracurricular activities like swimming lessons might include all of these things…
organising the lesson in the family diary
making sure the lesson is paid for and the direct debit is set up
the physical act of attending the swimming lesson
obtaining a credit when your child is sick.
When there are so many things that women do, the physical and mental labour of it is immense.
I’ve just received an email saying I’ve completed my Master’s Degree - I can graduate now! If I was to count the hours per week I put in when I was doing paid work, studying and childcare, the answer is extreme. Taking a realistic estimate, it would’ve been between 80 and 90 hours work a week. That might seem like a lot. But a stay-at-home parent (generally mother), working a 12 hour day, 7 days a week, works 84 hours a week.
Sometimes, some of this work will be shared with a male partner. Sometimes it won’t.
According to the Ministry for Women, the more unpaid work that women do, the less their labour force participation / hours of paid work. So unpaid work and bearing the responsibility for it, directly impacts on womens’ ability to earn an income and use other skills outside the home:
Ferrant et al. (2014) found that, in countries where women spend an average of five hours on unpaid care activities, 50 percent of women in the working-age population are employed or looking for a job. Whereas, in countries where women spend three hours on unpaid care work, 60 percent of women are active in the labour force. This suggests that a decrease in women’s unpaid care work is related to a 10 percent increase in women’s labour force participation rate. (Ministry for Women, 2020)
I think we should absolutely measure all the different forms of work we do. They’re all valid. They’re all hard work, regardless of what they are.
How many hours work do you do a week? Did it surprise you when you added it up?
