This is the new feminist outrage. All the feminists on Linkedin are delirious with this news. They claim "women do 80% of house work" so they will demand to be paid for that.
kaching!
https://www.axios.com/2024/03/22/womens-work-household-data
"Women's work" could soon be officially measured in government data
Emily Peck, author of Axios Markets
kaching!
https://www.axios.com/2024/03/22/womens-work-household-data
"Women's work" could soon be officially measured in government data
Emily Peck, author of Axios Markets
Quote:
The Labor Department might soon start tracking an often overlooked part of the economy: "women's work."
Why it matters: Unpaid household labor like child care, laundry or home repairs is critical to the economy but isn't officially measured.
State of play: Economists at Bard College released a report this week detailing how the government could measure this activity, which they call "household production."It doesn't capture activities that don't cost money but do cost time.
- The Labor Department commissioned the report in 2021, part of a major initiative aimed at coming up with a new component for one of its biggest reports, on consumer expenditures.
- That survey examines how much Americans spend on everything from food to furniture to restaurant meals.
Stunning stat: Women performed 78% of the total value of unpaid household production in 2019, the researchers found.The big picture: It's important to track this kind of data to understand so many things like Americans' true cost of living, explanations for the pay gap, and women's lower labor participation rates.
- That number reflects "the patriarchal allocation of household production responsibilities in our society," per the report.
Flashback: When day cares and schools shut down during the height of the pandemic, Americans got a crash course in how critical unpaid labor is for keeping society humming. That experience nudged the Labor Department into action.
- The measure could be particularly crucial in refining measures of poverty.
Between the lines: This is a win for feminist economists. For years, their mainstream peers, mostly men, argued unpaid work wasn't an economic issue because it's a woman's moral duty borne out of love.
Zoom in: To measure household production, the Bard economists looked at data from the census and other places, mainly from 2019, on how Americans spend their time. They paired this with Labor Department numbers on how much certain work costs.What's next: The Labor Department will evaluate the methodology used in this report with a goal of adding a household production measure to its expenditure data in 2025.
- For example, they looked at hours spent doing child care and at wages for child care workers and pre-K teachers.
- In a novel twist, the economists measured different kinds of child care active work, like reading to a child, and supervisory work, keeping an eye on the kids while you're doing laundry or something else. They also looked at unpaid work done by non-household members, like grandparents or aunts.
- The aim is to convert the hours spent on tasks into a measurable value.
