Lady Business: The massive value of women’s unpaid work

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 123rd issue, published February 28, 2021.

 

The $10.9 Trillion Pay Gap

I’ve spent a lot of time recently, here and at Fortune, writing about the ongoing employment crisis for women. With good reason: It’s a “national emergency,” as Vice President Kamala Harris said this month, and it’s not going away anytime soon.
 
Especially not if lawmakers continue to refuse to raise the federal minimum wage above its 2009 level of $7.25 per hour. Women account for 59% of those who would benefit from a $15 minimum wage—and such an increase would especially help women of color, who have been disproportionately hurt by the current economic crisis.
 
What we pay women, especially women of color, is one massive part of this crisis. So is what we don’t pay women. Even before the pandemic, women shouldered an outsized burden of unpaid work at home, from cooking and cleaning to taking care of children and older relatives. Even before the pandemic, women spent an average of four hours every day on this work—compared to an average of 2.5 hours for men.
 
So some of the economists and policy experts I’ve interviewed in recent weeks are happy that, amid all its wreckage, the pandemic is at least drawing more attention to the tremendous yet under-valued contributions women have always made to the global economy:
 
“The one silver lining: Feminist economists have been talking about the role of care in the economy for a very long time. And they’re shockingly optimistic about this moment,” Kate Bahn, an economist and the director of labor market policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, told me recently.
 
“The world of economics is recognizing that caregiving is the backbone of the economy,” she added. “And that does open up possibilities for it to actually be addressed through policy.”
 
The message appears to be resonating beyond U.S. policymakers—within modest limits. For example, it was great to see headlines this week about a Chinese court recognizing the value of women’s unpaid work, when it ordered a man to pay his ex-wife for five years of her unpaid housework and childcare.
 
Still, the court-ordered payment amounted to only $7700 for five years, or a mere $1540 per year. Chinese women spend about 4 hours per day on average doing unpaid labor, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development—meaning that, if she carried an average load of housework and childcare, this particular woman ended up earning about $1 per hour from her ex-husband.
 
That’s below even the U.S. sub-minimum wage for tipped restaurant workers, who earn $2.13 per hour, as well as other governments’ attempts to value unpaid labor. And it’s a drop in the bucket against the $10.9 trillion that women should have earned, but didn’t, for their annual unpaid labor even before the pandemic’s onset. In the United States alone, an Oxfam analysis found, American women earning the minimum wage for housework and caregiving should have been paid $1.5 trillion in 2019.
 
“Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women,” Indiana University sociologist Jessica Calarco told Anne Helen Petersen in November, in a comment that went viral (amid an interview that is worth reading in full).  
 
So I’m really looking forward to hearing more from Jess on Wednesday, when we will both participate in a panel discussion about how to cover women in crisis during the coronavirus. Also joining us will be C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and the person who dubbed this current crisis a “Shecession” last spring. As she told Fortune more recently: “We’ve lost so much ground. It’s astronomical.”
 
The panel is being hosted by USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism and is free to join; more info here, and you can register here. There’s so much more to cover about this ongoing crisis for working women, and I’m eager to hear more from Jess and Nicole about the next consequences—and solutions—we all should be paying more attention to.
 

Lady Bits

—Also, just why has it taken so long for the world of economics to realize that caregiving is the backbone of the economy? Or that Black women take on additional unpaid, and highly productive, work in community activism? Could it have to do, just maybe, with the extent to which economics as a profession is quantifiably hostile towards women and deeply lacking in racial and gender diversity?
 
—Every part of this Dave Ramsey investigation is wild, including Ramsey’s response to it. (It’s also yet another example of thorough, well-documented reporting on a male founder’s “toxic” workplace that somehow yields no immediate consequences.)
 
—Happy birthday to Ilena and Erika!
 
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com