The Hidden Economy of Patriarchy: Women's Free Work

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Every economy has a foundation: factories, offices, hospitals and schools all require workers. Without workers you don’t have anything. Even in the more fucked up economy we’re starting to have now were some of the worse work is allegedly ‘done’ by AI, that work still consumes the work hours of actual humans as running fuel.

The question that economists have traditionally been surprisingly reluctant to ask is where those workers come from.

Workers do not simply appear at the factory gate each morning, fully fed, clothed, educated, socialized, cared for, emotionally supported, and ready to work. Someone must perform the labor that makes labor possible.

Someone must cook the meals, clean the homes, care for children who will become future workers, care for the sick, the elderly and maintain the social relationships that hold families together. Someone must perform the endless work required to reproduce human life from one day to the next and from one generation to the next.

Historically, that someone has overwhelmingly been women, even if governments and economists like to pretend that it’s just ‘adults’ in general who are doing it for their own households. Let’s be for real; it’s overwhelmingly women.

In the previous part of this article series, I detailed how we are living in an emotional welfare state of patriarchy. I reviewed the research to highlight how men are essentially enjoying tons of free emotional labor from women that help their lives operate smoothly while providing nothing close to equitable in return.

Now, in this article, I want to focus on the non-emotional aspects of labor that women still provide for free, the ones that can be quantifiable in a number to see just how much the world owes us.

For the record, my friend The Equitable Home has created a free online calculator if you want to estimate how much your own domestic labor is worth and send an invoice to the patriarchy.

Let’s dive now into what women’s free work is worth globally according to major data sources and how it keeps sustaining the economy, institutions, private companies and virtually every aspect of the modern world without getting the fair recognition or compensation it deserves.

I will show the following:

• how much unpaid women’s work sustains economies and how much it would be worth

• the types of women’s unpaid work and why they are essential to humanity

• what would happen if countries started paying women for this work

• how much women are losing cumulatively over their lifetimes

• why women are not to blame for these arrangements even when they choose them

• what would happen if women went on a domestic labor strike at home...