I never do anything fun, because I’m a housewife. I hate that word ‘housewife.’ I prefer to be called ‘domestic goddess.’
– Roseanne Barr, American actress, comedian, writer, and television producer
When asked what his wife does each day, a husband once said, “Nothing. She sits home, eats my money, and gossips.”
Her wife is brighter and educated than her husband. This is not, though, quite the same thing as her being better than he is at everything. British political economist David Ricardo had something to say about that some 200 years ago.
And then, I asked what the wife did first thing in the morning. He told me that she prepared hot water. I asked how much someone would charge to do the job.
You see where this is going.
I actually wanted a cash equivalent for all the wife did. After calculating her (invisible) value, the husband saw that his wife earned more than him. I do applaud that he recognised her work had value. But in economics, as far as I know, figuring out that value is not quite so easy.
After learning the fact that a whopping over 2 million women in Malaysia are not working due to housework and family responsibilities, there is, sadly, a terrible misconception about the women’s work.
One of the standard snarling arguments about it is that women’s work is thought to be undervalued. All that unpaid work that women do in households is scandalously not just unpaid but undervalued as well.
The problem is that some people including myself decided to measure such unpaid work by using the average wages of those who are paid do these tasks, which gives an estimate of how much their unpaid work would be worth if they could find someone to pay them for it.
Consequently, we simply think women do X amount of unpaid work in the home, the equivalent of Y per cent of the gross domestic product, which values all of the paid work in the country.
That’s the mistake, to use the wage rate of people who specialise in such work. Of course, on the surface, the gender divide does make an appearance.
Let’s say women carry out an overall average of 60 per cent more unpaid work than men. On average, men do six hours a week of cooking, childcare, adult care, and housework, which include laundry and cleaning. But for women the figure is 26 hours.
The only area where men put in more unpaid work hours than women is in the provision of transport. This includes driving themselves and others around, as well as commuting to work.
Women do more unpaid work than men in every age group. So, everyone thinks we should just be giving them lots of money. On to whether mothers deserve it, no.
Labour is worth what someone will pay for it; will someone pay you RM12,000 a year to be a housewife? Sure, many mothers would just love to be getting the money for what they currently do unpaid but think that through, why should anyone pay anyone for what they willingly do unpaid?
No doubt that will cause outrage but it shouldn’t really. The true economic unit for human beings is the household.
This is true simply because that’s the way evolution turned out. It takes 16-20 years to raise a child, we pair bond (perhaps less now than in the past) for life and so on.
There’s also the possibility that we can get furious from trying to put a financial number on something like a mother’s love.
But then economists like to do that sort of thing. But as I say, the method of calculation is in error. For example, you cannot pay someone else to sleep for you but you can to make your bed: you cannot pay someone else to eat for you but you can to cook, cannot to wash on your behalf but can for someone to wash you.
You can most certainly pay someone to have sex with your spouse if you should so desire: fortunately, in this civilised era the time spent in a week actually having sex is too small for this to cause problems with the figures.
And this is something that has been looked at before by two Nobel prize winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen.
Specifically, they wanted to work out what valuation should we apply to such unpaid work? Why? Because the value of unpaid work done at home is tough to quantify that putting a price tag on a priceless job is hard to do.
Yes, household labour, unpaid labour, has a value and yes, to gain a clear idea of the economy we should at least attempt to value it. But as we do so we should be doing so properly as it does to mom making chicken soup for the ill child.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the New Sarawak Tribune.
