AIBU to think the economic value of what I do as a mother and housekeeper should actually be quantifiable?

[AndreaMartina]

I've been on maternity leave and somewhere between the 3am feeds and the fifth load of washing this week I started actually adding it up. Not venting, genuinely doing the maths.
Childcare alone in London runs £15-20 an hour. I'm doing that plus household management, appointment coordination, emotional labour for the whole family, meal planning, the mental load of remembering literally everything.
I built a calculator to invoice for it properly. Mine came to £83k.
AIBU to think this number should be part of every conversation about the gender pay gap? Not as a joke as an actual economic argument.

Yeah I’m not sure what the answer is. Colleagues are already resentful for my “year off.
I was fortunate in that I had 6 months full pay and pension contributions. Although no doubt my bonus will take a hit and it’s very much frowned upon all the days I have to leave for child care pick ups.however I’ve chosen to go back full hilt, yet recognise it’s not quite fair for mums to be full time working and taking on the majority at home. Something has to give.

I mean't paying for women if they choose to be sahm. Thats' why i apologised in advance because as it happens, I was wrong!
I am a silly Billy, it's the adhd dontcha know!

At an individual level women simply should not take on all the household responsibilities/childcare responsibilities
So many women I know do this and then complain about how stressful their lives are

Who should be paying compensation though?

The issue of (usually) women’s unpaid labour is something that people have tried to quantify for decades but what do you base that figure on? The loss of opportunity in the workplace, the actual financial loss sustained when a woman decides to go part time or take herself out of the workplace, the hourly rate of cleaners, gardeners, personal assistants etc?

In saying that, I saw an infographic showing the difference in household income and costs between 1980 and now with the presumption of a stay at home mum and it showed childcare as being free because mum did it. I immediately thought that no, it isn’t free - it comes at a high cost to the woman, particularly if he leaves her after sacrificing her earning power.

Welcome to women’s rights. Please don’t stop learning just because you’ve hit your first stop on why the patriarchy and misogyny are funded and fueled by women.

You are a strong and influential figure in your family and your community. You can share your maternity leave with your partner. He can support your keeping in touch days and eventual return to work. Even if he currently earns more - you need to stop that gap increasing between you - so drop his 5th day which is heavily taxed and ensure he looks after home and responsibilities at least three days a week. You are the person who is enabling this dynamic.

If you are partnered I’d get married. Marriage is a stronger form of legal protection for your family and child.

Then start thinking more widely about the society in which you are raising your child. Are you going to offload their care onto lower paid women so colluding in the cycle of economic devaluation of caring work? What do these children mean to you? An average career is now 40 years - so can you and your partner sacrifice some time now - out of those 80 years to pay attention to the child you’ve chosen to have and raise. Do you want them to only realise how important these issues are only after it’s happened to them?

Is your mother helping? Why not your father? What do you expect of males? What can you do to be the change?

I say all of this who has held parity with my husband while we child rear and take equal time off to care for them with a few days of assistance from a care giver in our home per week. It’s a societal and domestic issue. You’re powerful in both.

Also try telling men. You’re preaching to the choir over here.

It is compensated, women (at least in the UK) get maternity pay and benefits, it’s a personal choice whether to take a longer gap from full time employment and not split part time work with a partner.

Who should compensate any further than this? Where do you suggest the money comes from to support these adult lifestyle choices?

It’s a fun activity to wonder what you’d have to pay to replace yourself as a parent but a silly one. Nobody else is obliged to care for that child you chose to produce because you wanted a child.
A bit like all those people claiming caring benefits that get all outraged at their ‘income’ worked out by the hour. Your family, your responsibility. Can’t run a country with half the country being paid to look after the other half.

It sounds like you resent the work that comes with having dependents. You don't need to make new dependents.

Thank you! You're right that it's structural not inherent. Which is why I started trying to quantify it for a laugh. It's at patriarchyowes.me if you want to run yours. xx

Why are you doing everything?

I’m a stay at home mum and have been for years and years and I don’t do everything for the house and children, and I certainly don’t think about everything that goes on or book every appointment. I’m married and my husband is an adult. I’m not a maid or a PA.

I think your partner is the issue here.

I think it would be useful if there were some kind of blanket sum that any woman on maternity leave or any SAHM could point to if they have the kind of DP who likes to pull the 'you don't do anything of value' card. I had one of these. Apparently my staying at home (this was 30 years ago now, so much more common then) with our five kids, three under school age, meant I 'did nothing'. Only his Big Job counted for anything, which meant he didn't have to lift a finger around the house.

Being able to point to some mandated list of figures which give a breakdown of costs that would be incurred if both parents worked, plus a list of tasks involved in caring for children would have at least gone some way to showing him that, no, it wasn't me 'exaggerating' - this was what women do when they are at home with children.

DH and I split that work between us pretty much equally. I earn €10k more. Who should pay for us?

I do disagree. I’m not actually keen on describing looking after the children you decided to have as a job anyway, and making appointments, doing housework etc is all just part of being an adult. I don’t there is or should be a monetary value placed on just being an adult! I shouldn’t be considered wage worthy just because I care for a child I actively decided to have! I have lots of plants in my garden, they need upkeep- I’m not going to include ‘landscape gardener’ on my CV any more than I would include ‘Veterinary Nurse’ for looking after my dog.

Don’t we all do house management, men and women alike. And all take care of our own kids, even if in school or childcare we still take care of them at night and weekends, holidays,

my husband does equal to me, I can’t imagine us totting up how much it would cost if we didn’t care for our own children or manage our own home.

what a bizzare and outdated idea that only women do domestic chores.

acryally makes me shudder people think like this, it might be the case in your home, but don’t tar us all with the same brush,

1. women don’t have to do it all
2. everybody has to do housework, even people working FT
3. being a SAHP is a choice, asking for pay for it is ridiculous

1. Share the tasks.
2. Don't give up your job.
3. Don't take on a job that doesn't support your partner re the above.

It's really not complicated.

Dh and I had conversations about all aspects of the financial impacts of having dc, me being a sahm, the protections we needed to put in place.

There’s an enormous difference between what it would cost to replace a mother in the home like for like, and what it costs to make do without one. Insurance valuation goes with the latter.

As far as who carries the costs - ideally the dps do. We looked at in terms of the labour needed to support and sustain a household, and made decisions based on who would do what. Money is just a means to pay to outsource labour. We didn’t want to build a household ourselves, or chop trees for firewood so we pay a mortgage and heating bills. We didn’t want to outsource childcare or cooking so I took that on while he worked for a salary.

Thinking about labour rather than £££ meant that it was more intuitive to maintain parity of rest, and to share outstanding jobs in the evenings and weekends.

Isn’t it so odd, I mean who thinks like this. I had to do rhe hoovering how much would it cost to pay someone. I fed my own kids, what’s that cost. It’s just adulting, what next teenagers doing the same for doing their homework and cleaning their rooms?

It is possible to quantify how much work looking after a baby/child takes/costs.

obviously it comes with large margins either way.

but yes, whether women do it or men do it it is expensive. There’s a regular exercise where it’s worked out the cost of a child from zero to 18 and it’s always a hideous amount of money.

yeah, sure if you are single or married there’s a certain amount of housework and life admin anyway but I’d suggest anyone who says babies are no extra work at all hasn’t had one.

The government and workplaces are increasingly recognising structural inequality and mitigating it through things like enhanced subsidies for childcare, shared parental leave policies, flexible working arrangements regardless of sex to allow for caring responsibilities. Beyond that, individuals’ lifestyles and relationships need to be addressed within those relationships; and at an earlier stage where we engage young women in actively thinking about the choices they make for themselves and in their choices of partner - because that’s often where it starts.

This calculation is done for a number of reasons:

firstly for insurance - if a sahm dad or mum dies then the remaining parent will need to pay for someone or several someones to do their job. Insurance seeks to quantify this so people know roughly how much life insurance to get.

also, it is useful in comparing economies. Take a country like Denmark where most kids go into childcare very young. This is an economic transaction - people are paid to look after young kids.
compare a country that is largely sahms and Denmark looks like it has a bigger economy - but the sahms are doing the same work unpaid.

see eg here for a calculator

https://www.moneysupermarket.com/life-insurance/how-much-it-costs-to-raise-a-child-calculator/

All of these posters saying that individuals chose to have children therefore it’s not a societal issue and they should bear the cost alone, he do realise that if everyone chose not to have children, then society would cease to exist right?

This post should be pinned to the top of every thread on this issue!

Not this old chestnut again. Yes, everything you do is capable of being given a cash value. Every so often a survey or a think tank or a newspaper does the maths and produces the figures.

And nobody cares.

Surely the issue is why are you doing everything? My DH and I both work the same number of hours and split everything child and house wise. I’d never even consider dropping my work hours unless he did to.