Costing women's work

As Lucassen says, "women’s work is often overlooked compared to men’s" (2021, p. 1): I have written about this before (here), but an Australian researcher has just thrown a whole lot of skull sweat into actually costing it out (Risse, 2025). And it turns out that the proportion of overlooked, under-costed, and economically undervalued productivity in our societies is quite significant; for both men AND women. 

No surprises there. Men have almost another $500/week of unpaid work; women almost $800 (Risse, 2025). So we have clear evidence that women in our societies "contribute the bulk (61.5%) of total time spent on unpaid work and care" (Risse, 2025). Even better, this article provides a data entry field which allows us to enter and calculate out our own weekly unpaid hours. We can enter our estimated average weekly volunteer hours; the childcare hours we do; how many elder-care hours we deliver; and how many hours we spend on other domestic duties. Better still, if we are a woman, we can add a factor for our gendered pay, to have that corrected for, and to see just how many hours of work we are actually doing each week. Brilliant!

Check that tool out here, at the heading "Total value of labour", here.

It turns out that women are doing just as many productive hours as men: they simply aren't calculated as part of our economic budgeting. The author closes with a quote from our own Marilyn Waring, who noted that "The laws of economics and those that govern the UNSNA [United Nations Systems of National Accounts] are creations of the male mind and do not reflect or encompass the reality of the female world. The conceptual models are limited to the world that the economist knows or observes, and housework is most certainly not part of that world" (Risse, 2025).

It is important stuff, doing the dishes, taking out the rubbish, and turning the lights off. No job is done until that stuff is done.

Sam

References:

Lucassen, J. (2021). The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind. Yale University Press.

Risse, L. (2025, November 3). Unpaid ‘women’s work’ is worth $427 billion, new research shows. See how much your unpaid labour is worth. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/unpaid-womens-work-is-worth-427-billion-new-research-shows-see-how-much-your-unpaid-labour-is-worth-267860