Study examines enormous economic impact of women's unpaid labor

By Andrea Lynn

A new study puts a price tag on the unpaid labor of women around the globe.

The initial findings assess women's unpaid work contribution to households
and to "human capital," meaning the home care of children and adults, the
elderly and infirm, at $7,470,108,945,997 ($7.5 trillion in round numbers),
or 33.6 percent of the total gross national product (GNP) in 1990 for the
132 countries in the study.  When this unpaid labor was included, the total
GNP came to $29,709,005,175,997, say UI researchers Kathleen Cloud, a
professor of human development, and Nancy Garrett, a graduate student in
sociology.

Cloud, who released the findings last month at the Non-Governmental
Organizations Women's Forum in Huairou, China, described the study as the
"first approximation" of the value of unpaid female labor on a
country-by-country basis.

The researchers also found that in 1990, the GNP per capita in U.S. dollars
ranged from $80 in Mozambique to $32,370 in Switzerland; with the addition
of human capital labor, they found that the range for those countries went
from $97 to $44,531.  The smallest percentage gain in GNP per capita was 18
percent in Finland and the U.S.S.R., while the largest was 87 percent in
Bangladesh.

"The labor costs of bearing and rearing children, and of maintaining the
health and well-being of adult laborers, are invisible in national
accounts, although as much as 70 percent of the female labor force in some
countries is committed on a full-time basis to such household and human
capital production," the authors write in their report.  This is a gender
issue, they note, "because most private unmonetized costs of creating and
maintaining human beings are borne in the household by women."

Cloud and Garrett used three assumptions with United Nations and World Bank
data on the 132 countries for 1990, and calculated revised figures for
total male/female economic activity rates (measuring the percentage of
people engaged in economically productive work) and adjusted GNP for each
country to include the production of women's previously uncounted labor
time.  Those assumptions are:  In national-level data, the economic
activity rate of women 15 to 64 years of age is assumed to be equal to that
of men of the same age; to reflect the double day of working women, all
females who work in the paid labor force are assumed to contribute an
additional 33.3 percent of productive time to household and human capital
production; and the productivity of women's previously uncounted labor is
at least equal to that of the previously counted labor force.

With adjustments for women's time devoted to households and the care of
people in them, Cloud and Garrett found that economic activity rates for
women ages 15 to 64 average 100 percent, as compared to 86 percent for men
of the same ages.

Preliminary findings were presented at the conference of the International
Association for Feminist Economics, which was held in July in Tours,
France.