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.

Yes, I agree. It's certainly an interesting experiment if you have a spouse who accuses you of not doing much, when you can show how much it would cost them to pay somebody to do all that you do; but iy makes no sense on a society level.

Just like, if you drank 8 cups of coffee at home each day, you wouldn't be expecting to work over £1,000 a month into your budget to pay for it - based on what you would pay if you bought it all from a fancy coffee shop.

Equally, if you're a skilled, highly-experienced electrician, you can charge a decent hourly rate to change a light switch in a customer's house, but nobody is going to pay you for doing a full rewire of your own home.

Even Van Gogh couldn't earn a single penny by selling one of his priceless masterpieces to himself.

Work done in the home and for your family is very valuable; but the reason you don't get paid for it is because your own family benefits from it. Work done for somebody else isn't inherently more valuable per se, but it is far more valuable to them - hence they pay you for it.

BUT.... Economically it DOES have a value.

For example, {mention:AndreaMartina}@AndreaMartina-of
If she wasn't there.... Someone would have to do all those tasks... Ans unless it was close family someone would have to be paid to carry out these tasks...

but people forget the hidden 'economic' benefit to the household

'people' is an intereting choice of words here. Someone staying home to take care of their children and do all housework does not benefit random people, does it? It benefits their partner, who is free to earn money and progress in their career unencumbered by family obligations.

Just send your husband an invoice for that amount.

I think anyone could do that, couldn't they? I'm sure if my husband wanted to he could tot up how much his DIY would cost me if I got a handyman in, how much the driving around would cost in taxis, the gardening, the dog walking...

My parents could work out how much their care to their parents would cost.

It's just being an adult. And also on the point of 'charging' your husband - did you not want kids? And is he not working to support you to do so?

Yes, and that would be skilled workers. Someone employed to take care of another persons child. A job/career. If I can’t walk my dog I will pay someone with a job of dog walker to provide that service for me.

I am neither employed as a child minder nor as a dog walker so those responsibilities are mine and my duty (not job!) to look after!

I could of course be wrong, but what I think the OP is getting at is that being a full-time parent is looked upon as having no equivalent financial value in a relationship - largely by their partners who say 'Well I earn all the money and you earn nothing".

What so people would chose not to have kids if they aren’t paid ? How ridiculous.

People should have more open discussions with their partners about future financial responsibilities before embarking on parenthood. Some men love to have a woman at home playing housewife and some men like independent money makers, some men have a timeline to their generosity, some give endlessly. There is no right or wrong, it's their own personal boundaries and what feels comfortable to them. Not all women should expect the luxury of a man willing to pay for everything because that is a lot of pressure for men with an average income. Kids and homes are expensive to run and that value far outweighs having a cleaner and a cook. Everyone has admin.

And not every woman wants a man who pays for everything, I certainly don’t. I’m a grown up and earn my own income, an equal partner, I had no desire to be the little woman staying home doing the washing up and child care. No more desire than my husband has to do that.

it’s just such an outdated stereotype, fine for the individual if she wishes that.

and a woman’s place is not in the home. Doing basic adulting like the laundry, paying the bills or feeding our own kids is not a job, a chore to be paid for, we are not paid employees.

and it’s ludicrous to suggest that if a sahp didn’t exist then the male would need to pay 80 odd grand a year to replace. Most of them will hire child care and are perfectly capable of washing their own pants, ordering a shop in and doing the hoovering.

I do think that economies could be calculated in a different way. As we don't include things like unpaid caring responsibilities that are majority female tasks, we don't target support resources to them. I am not saying women should be paid for putting the laundry on, but that the country infrastructure should be more accommodating. For instance, instead of spending billions on HS2 for commuters to London, use the money for local hospital transport and dropped curbs. Our public spending and infrastructure are still majority male task oriented.

Correct anyone could tot it up. Almost nobody does, and that’s the finding, not a rebuttal. Your parents’ care for their parents has a market rate too. Nobody’s asked them to write it down, which is rather the point.

DIY, taxis, gardening, dog walking. Also billable, also uncounted, also welcome on the invoice. It doesn’t discriminate by task, only by whether the labour’s been priced and who’s doing the pricing.

On kids: wanting them isn’t the same as being paid for the daily work of raising them, and a salary covering the household doesn’t retroactively price the unpaid work happening inside it. Two people can want the same outcome and still do unequal amounts of the work required to produce it. That’s the finding, not an exception to it.

“People” was doing the work of “your partner” the whole time same beneficiary, less specific noun. You’ve just described the transaction precisely: one person’s unpaid labour subsidises the other’s paid career, uninterrupted. That’s not a hidden benefit to society. It’s a direct traceable one to one person. Which is exactly what gets itemised in the calculator.

You'd need to quantify the difference between adult life management with kids and without. Everyone I know who doesn't have kids also feels they do a lot of this, one one level they haven't a bloody clue to the extent that increases with kids but at the same time they aren't wrong. Meal planning, grocery shopping, cleaning, laundry, basic DIY/ repairs and budgeting and household management are common to all adults. And most adults struggle a bit with this because it is a lot.

I'd add another, which is hard to quantify, but the value of "not taking".

For example, we are relocating. We plan to go self employed, and I want to work on my health, and to grow my own fruit and veg, and to get on the PTA as well as give some of my services pro bono to charity.

Having zero food miles, a healthy diet, exercising and volunteering my time will all take away from time I could be maximising my income. But they should all contribute to my community too.

I definitely think there's an under appreciation of not contributing to the costs of society. We don't need productivity except to prop up the current, counterproductive system.

I should add, I agree with you OP. I was SAHM for many years and as soon as Dh no longer did nursery drops he got a big promotion. I am very quick to remind him that we earned that together.

Also bear in mind when calculating, that caring roles are a typical female led role and (by no coincidence) are low paid. It might be worth a second calculation based on the average industrial wage for men for a similar skill level to calculate the hourly cost and use that figure rather than the actual childcare cost.

The flaw with this reasoning is that when doing the calculation there is a mix of task that yes, would need to be paid for if the SAHP wasn’t doing it (childcare) and other tasks that most working parents would just do themselves - cleaning, shopping, etc. Why would a SAHP be paid for it when working adults are not?

What I am saying is that a SAHP saves the household the cost of childcare but they could earn a salary instead. The rest are not saved costs, just a luxury of someone having time
to do it during work hours, meaning both adults in the household have more time off than if they were both working FT.

I don't agree with putting a price on everything. Doing housework, raising children is a part of life and not something that has a value only if you receive money for it. I do understand the frustration that comes with housework - I'm not houseproud and one of the reasons I went back to work was that I could delegate at least some of it. But saying "I should be paid for doing the laundry" makes absolutely no sense to me. If you mean the loss of your income because you're not working, then you do have the chance to go back to work (you're still going to have to do the laundry though!). And I find it positively sad when parents want to put a price on parenting - you're building a loving relationship with your child, why are you even thinking you should be paid like a nanny?

This was the wages for housework campaign.

It was a deliberate decision not to calculate domestic labour as part of GDP. (Male) economists thought it was too much work to quantify.

now it’s all well and good to say that “you chose to have children” but children are going to be born and someone has to care for them. What’s more, domestic care work isn’t solely about small children but the elderly and disabled. Western societies rely on the unpaid caring labour of women. I read an American article the other day about how in the West the only country where more than half of care work is paid is the Netherlands. (I think this was specifically for the elderly.) it’s a much bigger issue than stay at home mothers. And women make career choices to allow for this unpaid work because they have little choice.

that said, most attempts to calculate the value of a stay at home mother are bad: you can’t impute the pay of a professional chef to a SAHM because she makes dinner.

Yes therefore I would not have used people here. Implies that SAHMs benefit also other, unrelated people, while we really mean specifically the partner. The fact my colleague has a SAHM does not benefit me in any way - quite the opposite, in fact.

Welcome to the 1970s 😞

No. Cant see the reasoning behind this. Who is going to pay you the £83k.

My personal opinion it depends on the context.
In relation to a couple or when parents have split absolutely. The main person (usually mother) loses economically. They are responsible for the joint responsibility of raising children. That should be reflected in things like money and that other admin should be split.
the same if one adult child takes on care for older parents and there are other brothers or sisters.

From a social point of view and for economic benefit in the future potentially as your children could be paying tax.

However your work at home doesn’t currently contribute to the economy

Seventeen years, solo, full-time, after being left mid-pregnancy that’s not “part and parcel of a life you chose.” (F**k him btw) You didn’t choose to do it alone. There was no partner quietly benefiting from your unpaid hours while his career moved forward untouched. you carried both roles yourself, for nearly two decades. That’s genuinely different and I think it deserves to be named as its own thing.

What hasn’t changed is that none of those years show up anywhere. no payslip, no pension credit, no line on a CV. You weren’t foolish. You were doing something enormous that nobody was keeping a record of. “More the fool me” is you being harder on yourself.