Unpaid domestic and care labour is estimated at somewhere between 10 and 39 percent of GDP depending on the country – invisible in national accounts, invisible in tax policy and invisible in superannuation and retirement savings. It’s the biggest unacknowledged transfer of wealth in the world, and it flows almost entirely out of women’s pockets.
The reason we don’t talk about this in dollar terms is because the number is too large and too inconvenient.
So I created a tool that lets you generate your own invoice.
A few things before you start: the hour estimates are conservative. The default for care work is twenty hours a week, which is low for anyone with young children or an ageing parent. The default for mental load is three hours, which is also probably low, because mental load doesn’t clock off. Adjust them to make it accurate.
Currency options include USD, GBP, AUD, NZD, EUR, and CAD, each pre-filled with the current minimum wage. You can also enter your own rate, at a living wage, at your actual hourly rate, or at what a household manager would cost to hire.
Share the invoice, send it to your group chat or post it here. The point is to make the number real.
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More reading:
She bought the house. He ran the other way.
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May 22
——— A woman goes on a first date. It goes well – the kind of well where you’re already doing the arithmetic of a second one. At some point she mentions she’s buying a house.
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