Women's unpaid global labour - household, shopping, forms of care - comes to £8.8 TRILLION
Sometimes it’s just about the facts, ma’am. From the New York Times:
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.
It isn’t a part of G.D.P. calculations and rarely factors into other measures of economic growth. It is notoriously difficult to value because the normal market signals of supply and demand don’t work: Traditional expectations that caring for children, the elderly and the infirm should be done gratis within the family obscure the true economic value of this work.
[Yet] women provide a huge unacknowledged subsidy to the smooth functioning of our economies, which would grind to a halt if women stopped doing this work.
…We looked at how much women would have made last year if they earned minimum wage for their unpaid work.
The value of this shadow labor is staggering: $10.9 trillion (£8.8 trillion) according to an analysis by Oxfam. It exceeds the combined revenue of the 50 largest companies on last year’s Fortune Global 500 list, including Walmart, Apple and Amazon.
We also compared the distribution of unpaid work across genders. India has the largest gap: Women there spend almost six hours a day managing the home; Indian men spend a paltry 52 minutes. The smallest divides are found in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, where social safety net programs provide care for children and older people.
The NYT provide some notes on their workings:
To calculate the value of women’s unpaid labor in each country, Oxfam multiplied the number of women above the age of 15 by the hours per year the average person spent on unpaid labor. They then multiplied the total hours by the nation’s minimum wage, converted to dollars using 2018 purchasing power parity. For countries with no minimum wage, Oxfam used living wage estimates.
Because Oxfam used minimum wages and looked only at countries for which it had data, its estimates are likely conservative.
Our list of the 50 companies with the largest revenues in the 2018 fiscal year comes from the Fortune Global 500. Fortune’s analysis omits private companies that don’t report detailed financial data to governments.