So many interesting and thoughtful posts on this thread!
When I was not in paid employment I remember hating being asked the question, "What do you do?" by people who I knew expected the answer of a job title. At the time I was "doing" several things: caring for my small children; a voluntary role for a charity and caring responsibilities for an elderly relative. Each of those roles if done by a nanny, paid employee of the charity or paid carer, would have been a satisfactory answer to the, "What do you do?" question. I would then be neatly pigeonholed into my "job" slot in the world of work. However as I was undertaking each role unpaid as a mother, volunteer and female relative the work I did had no status or value.