Women’s Unpaid Labor

If American women earned minimum wage for the unpaid work they do around the house and caring for relatives, they would have made $1.5 trillion last year.

Globally, women would have earned $10.9 trillion.

SOCIETIES RARELY TAKE STOCK of the value of unpaid care work unless there is a disruption in the supply.

On Oct. 24, 1975, 90 percent of Icelandic women refused to cook, clean or look after children for a day. It brought the whole nation to a standstill. Men across the country scrambled to fill in, taking their children to work and overwhelming restaurants.

Unpaid labor — what the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development defines as time spent doing routine housework, shopping for necessary household goods, child care, tending to the elderly and other household or non-household members, and other unpaid activities related to household maintenance — remains largely invisible to economists.

-Gus Wezerek and Kristen R. Ghodsee

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