All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.
All those thousands of hours that Australians put towards unpaid household work and care – cooking, cleaning and caring for family members – are an essential thread that keeps our economy stitched together.
But they’re not recognised in official economic statistics.
My new research puts a dollar value on what all this unpaid labour is worth to the economy: about A$688 billion. That’s equivalent to around one-third of gross domestic product – and is mostly contributed by women.
In other words, women and men are contributing roughly equal labour effort to our economy. But it’s not reflected in the way we measure our economy, or in the gender gaps that persist in pay, wealth, assets and control over resources.
The invisibility and under-recognition of “women’s work” – that is, the work that society assigns to women – is not just a matter of numbers.
It’s an erasure and diminishing of the value of women’s capabilities and contributions to our economy.