Women's Work

On October 24, 1975, ninety percent of Icelandic women refused to work at paid jobs, in the home, or anywhere else. They called it a “day off”, though what they demonstrated was how much labor had been invisible. Schools closed, factories shut down, flights were cancelled, and men brought their children to work because there was no one else to care for them. The economy of Iceland effectively stopped. The women named what had been unnamed: everything they did without wages was work, and its absence was catastrophic.

The standard way economists measure an economy is through gross domestic product. GDP counts what is bought and sold, but not what is done without money changing hands. A woman who cooks dinner for her family contributes nothing to GDP, but if she hires someone to cook dinner and goes out to work herself, GDP goes up twice: once for her wages and once for the cook’s. The economic system counts the second arrangement as more productive. This is not an oversight. Marilyn Waring, a New Zealand politician and economist, spent years documenting the specific decisions embedded in the UN System of National Accounts that made domestic and care labor invisible. Her 1988 book showed that these decisions were choices made by people who had never performed most of the work in question.

The consequences of that invisibility are far-reaching. Women have fewer pension entitlements because pension systems are built on formal wage labor. They have less access to credit because banks valued declared income, not the labor of raising children or caring for elderly parents. When Waring raised these issues in the New Zealand parliament, she was told that economics was a technical matter and not a feminist one. She pointed out that someone had already decided that preparing food counted as productive activity only if someone received a wage for it. If that is not a political decision, it is hard to know what is.

In Japan, the term sengyo shufu—“full-time housewife”—became widespread only in the postwar period, when rapid industrialization in the 1950s and 1960s created male industrial jobs and pushed women into domestic roles. The image of the sengyo shufu as a traditional Japanese institution is largely the invention of corporations and government policy from a period of perhaps thirty years. Before industrialization, Japanese women had worked extensively in agriculture, small business, and textile production. The “tradition” was assembled recently under identifiable political and economic pressure.

The sociologist Arlie Hochschild spent years tracking what happened when both partners in a household entered paid employment, which most households in wealthy countries had done by the 1980s. She found that women in dual-income couples were coming home and working a second shift of domestic labor while their partners rested. Over the course of a year, the average woman in her study worked roughly a full additional month compared to her partner. Hochschild called this the second shift, and the pattern was consistent across Europe, Australia, South Korea, and Latin America: when women entered paid work, they tended to add paid hours on top of unpaid hours rather than trading one for the other.

Hochschild also found that the women she interviewed had largely rationalized the inequality by developing what she called “family myths”: stories about why the division made sense in their particular case. The myths varied but the pattern was constant: women interpreted inequitable arrangements as choices, and blamed themselves when the choices felt unsustainable. This is the same mechanism by which the “passion principle” (discussed earlier) operates: exploitation is most durable when those experiencing it explain it to themselves as freedom.

The historian Silvia Federici argued that the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during which tens of thousands of women were murdered, were primarily a way to discipline female labor. The women most often accused were those who lived outside household structures, like widows, healers, and midwives. The trials coincided with the enclosure of common land and the creation of a landless wage-labor force. Federici showed that enclosing women’s reproductive and domestic labor inside the household, unpaid and culturally devalued, was an economic project as much as a cultural one; it produced a class of workers whose labor was essential and whose compensation was called love.

Today, the global economy depends on nursing, childcare, eldercare, and domestic service, which are all systematically undervalued because they are feminized. The workers are underpaid not because care work is unskilled but because the labor market for care work is structured differently from the labor market for work that men predominantly perform. In India, the national health system relies heavily on informal women’s health workers, the ASHAs, who are classified as volunteers rather than employees and receive “incentive payments” rather than wages. This is not an oversight; it is a legal and administrative decision with direct economic consequences for nearly a million women. The ASHAs have organized and struck repeatedly for employee status and wage protections. The government has consistently refused.

Platform labor has reproduced the same structure with new interfaces. Apps coordinating domestic cleaning, childcare, elder companionship, and household maintenance present themselves as markets connecting independent contractors with clients. What they actually do is take informal, feminized labor that was already undervalued and formalize it while keeping the wages and protections of the informal economy. The worker bears the risk, and the platform takes the margin; the work is performed overwhelmingly by women (often migrant women) working for rates that reflect the historical devaluation of care.

Invisible labor is endemic to tech companies. Research has shown again and again that women perform more of the relational maintenance that holds teams together, such mentoring junior colleagues and managing interpersonal conflict, without receiving credit for it in performance reviews or promotion decisions. A study of a large software company found that women spent significantly more time on what the researchers called “non-promotable tasks” that benefited the organization but was invisible to the criteria used to evaluate careers. When it was pointed out that women were doing more of this work, the response from management was to encourage everyone to do less of it, which predictably meant that women continued to do it and men continued not to.

Five years after the 1975 strike in Iceland, Iceland elected its first female president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, who went on to serve four terms. The organizing that preceded the strike built the political infrastructure that made the election possible. Fifty years on, though, the gap between men’s and women’s wages in Iceland has not closed, and women still perform more unpaid domestic labor.

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Federici2004

Silvia Federici: Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004, 9781570270598.

Folbre2001

Nancy Folbre: The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. The New Press, 2001, 9781565846555.

HochschildMachung1989

Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung: The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home. Viking, 1989, 9780142002926.

Waring1988

Marilyn Waring: If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics. Harper & Row, 1988, 9780062509338.