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.

Those examples all share something the household case doesn’t: one person, benefiting from their own effort. Coffee, Van Gogh’s own wall, no second party in the room getting value while you absorb the cost.

A two-adult household isn’t that. One person’s unpaid hours are what let the other leave the house, focus, and get paid without interruption. What I mean is that’s a transfer between two people, and only one side of it shows up on a payslip. You’re right that the family benefits too. But “the family benefits” and “the labour is evenly shared within the family” are two different claims, and only the first one is true here. If you want to try yours it’s here patriarchyowes.me

Your grandmothers not having a word for it doesn’t mean they weren’t doing it. it means nobody was counting it, which is a slightly different thing. Absence of a term isn’t evidence of absence of the work. It’s evidence of how long it’s gone undocumented.

And the documentation isn’t the same as resentment, or a wish to charge your own family. Loving the work and it being invisible in every economic measure like pensions, the gender pay gap… aren’t in conflict. You can find raising your children a privilege and also be someone whose working life, pension, and lifetime earnings were shaped by decades of unpaid hours nobody put a number on. Both are true at once. The tool isn’t asking anyone to send their family an invoice. It’s asking what happens to the national accounts when 16.4 billion hours a day go into GDP as zero ( I know this is a philosophical question as much as an economic one)

You clearly had something real with your husband and your grandmothers …partnership, love, showing up for each other, that’s great, amazing for you. That’s not what’s being measured here though, and nobody’s saying it should have had a price tag on it. What’s being measured is what happens to women’s lifetime earnings, pensions and career trajectories when that work is assumed rather than counted which is a policy question, not a verdict on whether you were happy doing it.

You know very well that that isn’t what I am saying.

My point is that there is a societal value in raising dc so that activity should be supported more by the state.

I agree in a sense that it’s a selfish decision to have dc but the benefit of a woman or man staying at home to look after dc isn’t just confined to them or their dc; it does have a wider value in the community we live in, as many of us will find out when we are old and fragile and require the help of people fitter and younger than us.

What’s being measured is what happens to women’s lifetime earnings, pensions and career trajectories when that work is assumed rather than counted which is a policy question, not a verdict on whether you were happy doing it.

It’s a policy question in the sense that we can start having a go at tackling it by societally mitigating many of the reasons women’s careers and their pension trajectories are affected: government subsidy for childcare which supports women to return to work after maternity leave so they don’t end up with career gaps; parental leave policies which enshrine the idea that fathers should be encouraged to take several months off work to care for babies just as mothers do (in some countries, the parental leave must be shared by both parents, mothers can’t take all of it); mandated flexible working entitlements so that men can request to structure their working day to do the school run or take a child to a medical appointment, rather than the assumption being that mum will do it. In time, that shapes both personal and societal attitudes towards the sharing of the domestic load, and brings greater equality.

I think that’s a more productive method of addressing an issue we know exists but which is nebulous to tackle through philosophical questions around what domestic work in our own homes has a monetary value, how much should be placed on it, and whether it has the exact same monetary value in the home as when done professionally.

My point is that there is a societal value in raising dc so that activity should be supported more by the state.

Of course there is.

However is it economic value ? It's no use having children if that aren't any value to the economy. Or are my Thatcher years showing ? They were certainly excellent preparation for political discourse in 2026.

We all raise our children, that’s what being a parent is. Working or not, we all raise them, it is not a job or unique to thr financially inactive or unemployed.

Staying home will never be paid for, it’s a choice. A luxury even. No one is going to pay you to stay home or fall at your feet as raising the next generation of heroes for doing the laundry and making the tea.

And please stop calling it women’s work, it’s not the 1950s

Damn, I’m owed over £2 million. AND I still have an “actual” job!

Surely, this is just sustaining life though, apart from childcare. I cooked and cleaned and did life admin, booked appointments, managed building work, etc before I had dc when I was living alone. Dh and I both do it now that we are married and have children. We do it even while working. It’s not like that stuff goes away when you go back to work or that it has to be all you.

I don’t currently work. I do the meal planning and cooking and school runs and organising stuff, but Dh does a significant amount of the actual hands on childcare and the driving around to activities and the entertaining on the weekends (while also running a business FT). But despite not working, I do have my own money and not working isn’t because I’m a woman (it’s because I have cancer). If anything, it’s Dh who is disadvantaged by all this. He’s run ragged working plus parenting, plus he pays me what is essentially a salary every month (£2k).

I’m definitely at a disadvantage having a serious illness, but not because I’m a woman, but that’s because I have a quite egalitarian relationship.

I get really tired of the "Why should I have to pay for other people to have kids when I chose not to?" argument. Who do you think will be the workforce providing services you need in the future? Or paying for your state pension when you are elderly? Yes, of course people are financially responsible for their own children, but in order for the country to function, people need to have babies. It isn't unreasonable that the state helps to make family life a bit more manageable - it's investing in everyone's future.

Nobody. That's not what it's for. It's not a bill anyone's expected to pay. It's a way of putting a number on something that currently has none, so it can be compared to things that do get counted: salaries, pensions, etc. link is Patriarchyowes.me if you want to try xx

Sounds more like a husband issue. My husband and I split childcare and housework. We took shared parental leave. We earn roughly the same amount. I’m don’t think either of us are owed any extra.

If you had a dog, would you add up dog walking/feeding/vets appointments?

Who is going to be your doctor/nurse/ carer when you are older, if everyone is so individualistic that nobody's child has the social empathy or funds to pursue such careers? I think it's so short sighted how people think they owe society nothing because they didn't have children. You absolutely fail to realise that you stand to benefit from parents being able to bring their children up well and from those children not growing up in poverty or with parents who cannot afford to provide and be vaguely present.Perhaps we should make a law that anyone who believes that they should not care one iota about the next generation should not benefit from the services the next generation will provide 🤔

Other than childcare, all independent adults have to do this, the question is why are you doing it all? I did it all but worked part time only once kids were in school so had more time, it balances out but if you don’t want to do it all (and not work outside the home) make sure tasks are shared

labour for the whole family, meal planning, the mental load of remembering literally everything.

Unless your adult partner is on Mars right now, why are you doing all of this?

Im not going to quantify my domestic labour. But I was pondering that since women have entered better paid, more rewarding work, they stopped doing so much care work for free and the country cant afford to run itself. Im always hearing how, early yrars care, social care and elderly care is so expensive - which just shows how much that free labour was all worth to the economy. It really did used to fall on women around thier lower paid work.

Thats not to say I think women shoukd work for free! (and I recognise that some care is so complex now too). Just we undervalue stuff traditionally done by women..

You’re clearly just driving traffic to your own website but I’ll bite.

You’ve chosen to be fucked over by patriarchy. Some of us chose otherwise and picked functioning partners that did at least their fair share from birth enabling both partners to “leave the house and focus on work full time”.

Read The Woman’s Room by Marilyn French. It’s all about this. Great book.

I think there’s are two main points of value:

Having it recognised within your relationship so that you can say to your partner “I spent every evening this week cooking and clearing up and all day on Saturday cleaning the house and doing laundry whilst you relaxed, this isn’t fair, either you change or I will leave you and you will either have to do it yourself or spend £83,000 a year paying professionals to do it for you.”

Having it recognised within social policy by the government saying “we recognise that hundreds of millions of pounds in tax receipts and pension contributions are lost when women don’t go back to work after having children, so we will make it so that fathers also have to take parental leave, and are allowed by their workplaces to work flexibly so they can cover school runs and child sickness, and that way we will enable greater financial parity for men and women.”

I’ve seen that website before and I think it only serves to assign incredulity to what can otherwise be a worthwhile discussion. Patriarchy has nothing to do with menstruation, and being the only ones who can do childbirth and breastfeeding (optional in itself) is just an unfortunate reality for women who choose to have children (and on the basis that most men are broadly less fussed about having children than women are, I suspect philosophically they’d happily knock those aspects off their “bill” and just not “owe” the cost of having children in the first place.)

@AndreaMartina You just want us all to go to your website!

And your premises is a nonsense. I paint my own nails rather than going to a salon, who do I invoice? I clean my home rather than pay a cleaner (well, me and my husband both do) who do I charge? I (hopefully) raised my kids in a way that means they don't need to shell out for therapy later - should I bill them?

The difficulty is that there's nobody around to do your performance review, you cannot be sacked (ok, you could have your children taken away but that's rare) and everyone delivers the serviced of childcare and housekeeping to different personal standards. Pension contributions continuing if nursery/ school plus one other can attest that your children are clearly turning up well cared for might be an option so that parents don't end up being poor pensioners. In terms of family values, it's for a household to decide how to balance the books. However, you potentially receive child benefit and possibly universal credit if your household income is below a certain threshold and you have dependents.

Ha, fair, I'm not going to pretend I don't like the site.
But on the actual point, nail painting and raising good kids both benefit you, same as the person doing them, so there's no one else to bill. The cleaning one's interesting though, you said you AND your husband do it ...so that's already split, which is kind of the whole thing. Nobody's "owed" anything when it's shared. It's more about when one person's doing most of it, alone, so the other person gets free time they didn't have to earn. x

But the only people that can do anything about that are the individuals themselves. If you have had enough of being a skivvy, then you are the only one that can address that with the seemingly lazy lump whose DNA you decided was worth passsing on.

Okay I kind of get where you're coming from... So you have saved your husband £83k by doing all of housework etc. if that's the case you have a problem within your marriage. But why is it all on you? And why would you consider invoicing him (I get you're probably not going to do this really) as opposed to insisting and expecting that he cleans up after himself. Also - is your cleaning and housework 'worth' as much as a professional's? Mine isn't, I'm crap and can't be arsed, but it would be a false equivalent to say that me spending an hour doing the dishes, wiping down the counter and listening to podcasts is 'worth' £25 per hour, or whatever a professional charges.

But anyway don't go too far down this rabbit hole. Your husband needs to pick up after himself because he's an adult and that's what adults do, not because of any monetary reasons. Otherwise what's to stop him from saying 'okay then, but as your employer I expect...'

Decent husbands do housework.