The Facts -- New Internationalist

new internationalist
issue 181 - March 1988

Overworked, undervalued
Paid work done by both men and women outside the home
in West Germany totals 55,000 million hours a year - and earns
them a total of $335 billion^1,2. Housework done by women inside the home
totals 53,000 million hours a year³- and earns them no money at all.

DOING TIME

In the poor world

Women in Pakistan spend an average of 63 hours a week on domestic work⁴.
Carrying water in Tanzania takes 4 hours of a woman's time and consumes between 12% and 27% of her day's calories⁵.

Grinding grain, by hand, for a family in Mexico takes between 4 and 6 hours a day⁵.
In India grinding grain takes 1.3 hours a day even when a mill is available⁵.
In Indonesia women spend over 3 hours a day just preparing food⁵.

In the rich world

Housewives in Australia do between 50 and 80 hours of housework a week⁶.
One survey in the US put the figure even higher, at 99.6 hours a week⁷.
Women with small children in the UK devote 50 hours a week to child-care alone⁸.
Women in Canada did an average of 50 hours housework a week in 1978⁹.
A survey of 650 UK housewives found that they vacuumed the living room carpet an average of 215 times a year and cleaned the bath 182 times¹⁰.

In a Rwanda village women work three times as much as the men. This is because women do virtually all of the domestic work three quarters of work in the fields and half of work with the animals. Meanwhile the men tend the banana trees and do most of the paid work outside the home⁴.

COUNTING THE COST

The value of housework can be calculated by costing the various component tasks at market rates paid to cleaners, cooks, laundry workers etc. UK-based insurers, Legal and General, calculated the cost of replacing a housewife's services in the event of her death or disability in 1987 and came up with the following figures¹²:

Time	Job	Hourly rate of pay
0700	Childminder Cook/waiter/dishwasher	$ 6.30 $ 10.71
0700	Childminder Cook/waiter/dishwasher	$ 6.30 $ 10.71
0800	Driver	$ 6.48
0900	Shopper	$ 4.32
1000	Cleaner	$ 5.40
1100	Laundry worker	$ 4.32
1200	Laundry worker	$ 4.32
1300	Cost clerk	$ 6.30
1400	Cleaner	$ 5.40
1500	Driver	$ 6.48
1600	Childminder	$ 6.30
1700	Childminder	$ 6.30
1800	Cook/waiter/dishwasher Childminder	$ 10.71 $ 6.30
1800	Cook/waiter/dishwasher Childminder	$ 10.71 $ 6.30
1900	Childminder	$ 6.30
2000	Tailor	$ 6.30
2100	Tailor	$ 6.30

These figures underestimate the value of unpaid domestic work by at least 30%³ because of depressed market rates for the equivalent work (see Pink collar workers).

The price of a wife
Other research has come up with the following values
for a woman's unpaid domestic work in the home:

US: $6,500 per year in 1977. That's 6 times the US military budget and half of total GNP⁷. If being on call' for child-care is counted, the cost rises to $700 per week (1979)⁷. A 1980 estimate put the annual value at $14,500⁴.

CANADA: $6,000 per year in 1978, which adds up to $26 billion or27% of GNP¹¹. A survey in 1975 found that 49% of people thought women should be paid for housework⁹.

UK: $360 (200) per week for child-care alone, which would total $27 billion or 6% of GNP (1984)⁸.

MAN ABOUT THE HOUSE

A day in the life

Hours worked weekly	by MEN	by WOMEN
Philippines⁷	41	61
Uganda⁷	23	50
Indonesia⁵	61	78

How he helps

Men in the US do an average of 1.6 hours of housework a day, irrespective of whether their wives / partners have jobs outside the home¹³.

In the UK 93% of the cleaning and 90% of child-care is done by women¹⁰, who also prepare 77% of evening meals¹⁴.

One survey of UK men found that only 2l % had ever washed any clothes and only 19% had ever done any ironing¹⁵.

His 'n' Hers
Research into who uses which tools around the house reveals that men tend to use tools for one-off occasional jobs, whereas women use tools for regular frequent repetitive tasks¹³.

Used by MEN: drill, saw workbench, electric sander, hammer, screwdriver.

Used by WOMEN: stove, carpet sweeper, vacuum cleaner, pressure cooker, iron, electric mixer, washing-machine, sewing-machine, tumble dryer.

PINK COLLAR WORKERS

Woman's work
Outside the home women tend to be employed in occupations that mirror the kind of work they do inside the home.

In the UK over 90% of clerks, cashiers, maids, nurses, canteen workers and sewing machinists are women¹³.

In Latin America and the Caribbean women working in the service sector outnumber men by over four to one⁴.

In the USSR 82% of workers in the health service and 74% of teachers are women⁴.
Women in Australia, Norway and the US are five times as likely as men to be working as secretaries or clerks⁴.

Woman's worth
Because housework is considered menial and unskilled (partly because it is unpaid) the equivalent work in the market-place is also considered unskilled, and paid for at a correspondingly low rate.

In the US a secretary with 18 years' experience earns less than a parking lot attendant¹⁷.

Research in 24 industrialized countries in 1982 found that women in manufacturing earned an average of only 73 cents for every dollar earned by men doing equivalent work⁴.
A nurse in the UK earns $14,000, that is $6,000 less than a fireman (sic)¹⁸.

Bosses and secretaries
'Today's secretary also acts as wife, mother, mistress and maid. Office work is the business equivalent of housekeeping - concerned with tidying up, putting away, and restoring order. Filing is like washing the dishes. Typing a perfect letter is as transient an achievement as cooking an egg.'¹⁶

[image, unknown]
see below for clear graph...

	BOSSES		SECRETARIES
	Women	Men	Women	Men
GERMANY (Fed.Rep.)	1.3	4.2	34.0	9.6
HUNGARY	0.1	0.2	16.4	3.5
UNITED STATES	3.8	10.4	27.9	5.5
JAPAN	0.4	6.4	18.2	9.4
EGYPT	0.8	0.9	25.0	6.5
SINGAPORE	1.2	8.2	14.9	5.7
VENEZUELA	1.6	9.2	16.7	7.6

% of male and female labour force in administrative and managerial (bosses) and clerical (secretarial) jobs.

Source ILO.

CAREER CHAOS

Career structures and working hours in most countries assume the worker has no domestic responsibilities. This is why women, though half of the world's adult population, are only a third of the official cash-earning labour force⁴.

Part-timers
Housework, especially that concerned with child-care, prevents many women working full-time.

In the UK 41% of employed women and 2% of men are working part-time⁴.
One in 25 woman teachers in the UK and one in 12 woman nurses has had to abandon her career and now works part-time in a cleaning or catering job¹³.
Women's responsibility for housework prevented them earning $27 billion in overtime payments in the UK in 1987¹⁹.

Love or money
Housework prevents many women putting in the number of hours necessary for promotion in their careers. Women with careers often have to sacrifice their private lives.

Women professionals in the UK are over three times as likely as men to be unmarried²⁰.

50% of top women managers in the US are childless¹⁷.
Women in the US are three times as likely as men to interrupt their careers in order to take care of children, typically dropping out for 9 years. A 2-to-4-year break depresses earnings by 13%; a 5 year break by 19%¹⁷.

In 1985 bringing up two children was estimated to cost the average UK woman $88,200 in lost earnings²².

1 World Bank, World Development Report 1987.
2 International Labour Office, World Labour Report, Vol.3. 1987.
3 L Goldschmidt-Clermont, Unpaid Work in the Household, International Labour Office, Geneva, 1982.
4 D Taylor (Ed.), Women: A World Report, New lnternationalist/Mettruen, 1985.
5 B Rogers, The Domestication of Women. Tavistock, 1983.
6 B Cass (Ed). Women, Social Welfare and the State, Allen and Unwin. Australia.
7 L Leghorn and K Parker, Women's Worth, Routledge ann Kegan Paul, 1981.
8 D Piachaud, Around About 50 Hours a Week, Child Poverty Action Group, UK. 1987.
9 Reported in the Toronto Star, 31 May 1975.
10 The 1,001 Dirt Report survey of 650 housewives.
11 Reported in the Toronto Star, 20 June 1978.
12 How the Insurers put a Price on a Wife, in The Times, London, 28 March 1987.
13 W Faulkner and E Arnold, Smothered by Invention. Pluto, 1985.
14 HMSO, Social Trends, UK, 1987.
15 Association of Market Survey Organizations, Men and Domestic Work, UK.
16 M K Benet, Secretary: An Enquiry into the Female Ghetto. Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1972.
17 S A Hewlett A Lesser Life. The Myth of Women's Liberation, Michael Joseph, London, 1987.
18 Reported in The Observer. 10 January 1987.
19 Research by the General, Municipal and Boilermakers' Union, reported in The Guardian, London, 19 January 1985.
20 A Oakley, Housewife, Penguin, 1976.
21 Survey reported in Woman Own, UK, 20 March 1876.
22 Research by the Centre for Economic Policy Research reported in The Guardian, London. 19 January 1988.