Women do an enormous amount of unpaid labour. A 2018 report of the International Labour Organization (ILO) took survey data from 64 countries, representing two-thirds of the world’s population, and estimated that the people in the countries surveyed performed over 16 billion hours of unpaid household work everyday (ILO 2018). Women did 76 per cent of this work. This means that women’s unpaid labour in these countries totaled about 4.5 trillion hours a year, a volume of work equivalent to that of 2.1 billion full-time jobs (based on a 40-hour paid working week).

What is all this work worth? Estimates for the US economy of the value of unpaid childcare, an important component of non-market household production, run to trillions of dollars – one calculation for 2012 places it at $3.2 trillion, or approximately 20 per cent of that year’s GDP (Suh & Folbre 2014). This number only captures unpaid childcare, and does not add in all the other non-market services produced within households. Efforts at valuing unpaid work across a variety of countries typically come up with estimates in the range of 15–40 per cent of GDP, depending on the methods used (UN Women 2015). This range of the estimated value of unpaid work is of the same order of magnitude as the monetary value of the public sector’s contribution to the measured economy. Macroeconomists would never think to exclude the government from their analysis. Yet non-market production using unpaid labour is routinely ignored in macroeconomic statistics.

Earlier we argued that changes in the macroeconomic environment interact with structural sources of gender inequality to yield different outcomes for women and men. One source of inequality is women’s disproportionate burden of unpaid household work. The unbalanced way in which women’s labour is allocated must be addressed to reduce, and ideally eliminate, persistent gender inequalities in the world’s economies. But it is hard to rebalance the non-market side of the economy when unpaid work does not count and is rarely acknowledged.

Feminist economists have long pointed out the need to recognize, value, and do something about the unequal burden of unpaid work.