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.

Why should other people pay for your choices to have kids or more than one

It’s your choice to have kids
your choice to do everything

But because (as you admit) you can't invoice anyone for this labour the price tag is totally arbitrary so the £83k figure is completely meaningless.

I make really good sourdough bread. My kids love it and it's healthier than shop bought. I could say that I'm so good at it, so invaluable, that the process of making it should be valued and paid. Let's say £200/ hour. It takes 48 hours.

I could tell my husband I'm saving the family 9600 a week 😁

My figure has as much meaning as your on call allowance

Have you watched The Change OP?

It’s your own children that you chose to have. It’s not a contribution to society.

Definitely YANBU. There are lots of good books on the subject if you're interested, you could look at Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner by Katrine Marçal

This is exactly it.

Your choice to have children (& I say that as a parent myself) and your responsibility for that lifestyle and all it entails going forward - whether 2 or 1 parents / parent.

You (2 or 1 parents) are literally raising another physical part of you in an already overpopulated world - how does that benefit anyone else outside of your family to the extent they should pay you for it? Why should it be anyone else’s responsibility? (Genuine questions).

To add, parents do already get financial support circa £100 per month per child.

I wonder if the majority of men are working longer hours outside the home than women? I know that is my and most of my friends’ situation.
This of course doesn’t excuse men from doing any of the home / lifestyle stuff when they’re not working - that is down to the individual, how they have been raised etc.

People have done this type of calculation on here before. These calculations come across as being stupid as do women who put a long list of jobs on their cv like household manager, PA etc

Most of this stuff is basic adulting. Putting a load of washing in is part of life at whatever stage. Childcare is different but people who work and have children are making meals, washing clothes and doing jobs around the house. Now SAHMs often have neater homes but there is quite a lot of busy work that is going on. It drives me absolutely nuts when people see ‘house admin’ as the equivalent to an actual job. Paying some bills is just part of normal life.

I dislike it when people refer to everyday chores and childcare as 'basic adulting', because there are lots of adults (mostly men) who go merrily through life not having to do much of it while someone else (in many cases, a woman) does it for them.

So this stuff is, in many cases, 'basic adulting' for women, but optional for men. Which I think is part of the point that the OP was trying to make.

Maternity leave is a big part of the problem.

I see the attitude on here quite often that women, during maternity leave, should be picking up the majority of chores and childcare since they're at home and it's "fair". Heaven forbid that a woman who has just given birth and is coping with a newborn baby should catch a break for a few months!

Then she goes back to work and the pattern has become established that she's doing everything else as well. And it's not in her partner's interests to break that pattern, he's quite happy with the status quo. So it continues until the relationship blows up or breaks down, or the kids grow up and become less work.

It’s why I think the model of shared and non-transferable parental leave in several countries is a great social policy: a couple between them are entitled to e.g. 52 weeks of paid parental leave after having a baby, of which the father (or non-birthing parent, in the case of lesbians) must take e.g. 14 weeks. If he chooses not to, the mother doesn’t get to take those 14 weeks herself, they’re just lost - so the majority of fathers do take them because just letting them be lost seems daft. It helps to prevent that pattern becoming entrenched in the first place and shapes the view that both parents should have caring roles and responsibilities.

Maybe I’m particularly thick today, but I don’t really understand what you’re getting at.

Within a household? - then yes I agree, and within a lot (most?) of households and marriages, money is all communal money. This is because one may have a higher salary than the other, but the one with less probably contributes more in other ways which needs to be recognised - and in most respectful, decent marriages it IS recognised.

Within a whole society though? As people said, a lot of this is just “adulting”. I think you’d get all sorts of issues there. Some people do more (excessive amounts) of laundry than others for example - should they get financially rewarded for this? And my DC woke up many, many times a night for years - does that mean I am owed by the state (?!) more than a friend who had babies that slept through the night by six months? Presumably not. You can do more or less cooking or cleaning or whatever as suits your lifestyle. I never felt that an old colleague of mine who washed her bedsheets daily because of (too many) dogs in her house and was walking separate pairs of dogs in every spare moment was giving more to society than me, who had more leisure time.

Who are you going to “invoice”. If f it’s your husband, are you going to await his invoice for the cost of housing and feeding you at any point you aren’t earning?

It’s not an economic argument because doing housework is not an economic contribution. Most people work full time, do housework, and many also raise children. You’re doing two out of three currently, that’s a pretty privileged position to be in.

And don’t kid yourself that, in a world where men pay £83k a year to have their house tidied and children raise, there’d be more equality. No, there’s just be fewer men having children or sharing property.

My DH WFH. I have a job that requires travel away from home for up to a week at a time on average twice a month.

Female police officers, nurses, paramedics and other emergency crews will usually be working 13 hour shifts.

The reality is a real and active refusal by women to demand more of men, either because they have been raised to believe that women are carers and nurturers and that men “don’t see mess/don’t do it as well as I do” as though they are utterly incapable. Once breastfeeding has finished there is actually nothing a mother can do that a father couldn’t. But women don’t seem to like that proposition and prefer to martyr themselves. And men quite like being able to just get on with work while their wives run themselves ragged. Look how few take up the offer of shared parental leave or make flexible working requests to go part time when they become parents.

It’s common for women to say something like “I’d never work full time with small children”. How often do you hear men say this?!

Some women, not all women, don’t tar us all with the same brush.

but past that I agree with you. You never hear men say that, and you never see men attacking other men for going to work, or screaming to other men about how they are not raising their children. No one disputes a child with two parents is raised by both, irrelevant of the working status. No one says well my kids were raised by the school,

irs just such a silly and embarassing argument, that there is some form of societal value to keeping house and doing child care, there is not, no more than any other parent who works, there maybe value in your family, but society, no cmon,

and the silly he onky got where he was in his career as I looked after the kids. No no he didn’t, he did gnat himself. And if you split up you’d have the kids half the time and he could hire a nanny. For his half. It wouldn’t cost 83 k a year, and most men can cook a meal, or run a hoover round.

pretending it’s some form of sacred sacrifice that society should value is ludicrous. Calling it women’s work is cringe worthy.

we all keep our houses, we all raise our kids, we all do domestic admin. It’s called being a parent and an adult. No is is giving you a cheque as you cleaned the toilet this morning and out the rice crispies out.

You’re right, not all women. But a sizable majority, I’d say (sadly).

Highly recommend The Home Stretch by Sally Howard about this!

It’s obviously different for different demographics.

Rather than women being martyrs, that is more to do with how men are raised.

It’s scientifically proven that, typically, males and females are wired differently. There are some men who don’t ’see’ mess in the way their female partner does, or they see the mess but it doesn’t bother them, whereas it bothers their partner. And I expect there are relationships where the opposite is true, but personally I believe these are in the minority (maybe that’s a sociodemographic thing).

From my experience in homes and workplaces (I’m almost 50), I don’t think the majority of men can multitask to the extent women do, or in the home have the same child raising or home making (for want of a better word) skills as women, whether that is down to nature or nurture. Why are the majority of ‘home influencers’ and the like on social media, female?

Biologically, mentally, hormonally, physiologically, physically, men and women are different.

Couldn’t disagree more. I’m 49. Both of my parents worked full time (mum went back to work nights when I was a month old) and my dad did pretty much all the domestics. DH does considerably more domestic and child related stuff than me.

I was never going to be the default parent. And once I was done feeding DD, I wasn’t. DH is the first contact for school, does all the doctors appts, 90% of the cleaning, cooking etc. His mother never worked. He knew from day 1 I would never do that.

I have ADHD. I can’t tell you where anything is, and can destroy a room in 10 seconds trying to clean it. I can also fix your roof, car and draft you a pretty mean legal letter.

This isn’t that uncommon in the people I know either. Maybe “girl power” captured us more than others. 🤷🏻‍♀️

We are the same age - our upbringings were different in that my dad worked full time and mum part time and did the majority of cleaning etc - she is a brilliant cleaner and homemaker and those are not skills that should be downplayed or not valued. So we are coming from different backgrounds - as I said, sociodemographics.

I’m a feminist and personally I wanted to reduce my working hours and be at home with my dd before she started nursery because she’s our only one. There is nothing non ‘girl power’ about that. A big part of feminism for me is about personal choice and being privileged to have the freedom of that in this day and age. I work part time now, would not want to go back to full time work as I did that for long enough as a journalist while single. I value my time, family and home over money now, we are all different after all, and I am lucky enough to be able to indulge that because my husband works longer hours than me.

You don’t say whether you or husband work or what hours you do - but personally I wouldn’t want to be fixing roofs, though I could if I learned how! It’s horses for courses. My husband does plenty around the house, with us as a family and with the cars / garden. Our skills are different and hopefully complement each other - as you and your husband’s do, but the opposite way round.

I firmly believe though it is basic adulting. There is a level of basic self care that independent adults should be able to manage including paying bills, using a washing machine, basic cleaning and cooking. I’d feel like I’d failed as a parent if I sent my children to university and they couldn’t do any of it so men shouldn’t suddenly become incapable just because they have children…but I do agree many seem to get away with it.

We both work more than full time. Him across time zones, me literally being away from home 50% of the working month.

Feminism for me is not the freedom to choose to work part time (which is highly patriarchal when it’s only women making that “choice”) but the freedom to expect the same choices as men (and vice versa). My husband didn’t want to change his name when we married, and neither did I. My husband didn’t want to go part time when DD was born and neither did I. My husband didn’t want my career to take a back seat just because I became a mother, and I would never ever give up my financial freedom (long or short term) to be reliant on someone else.

it’s not about not valuing domestic work. It’s about making g sure it isn’t always (or mostly) the women doing it. Because there absolutely isn’t any difference in brains (or pants) that allow men or do big jobs but not women, and no dick is too big for a man to be able to wash up or push a hoover around.

& those are your choices and that is fine. As I said, my dh does his share of chores / house maintenance / childcare when he is home but the reality is, that out of my personal choice, I am home for a much larger percentage of the week than he is, and being of a tidy / organised mindset, I naturally enjoy creating a home like that.

I didn’t ‘give up my financial freedom’ to be ‘reliant’ on someone else - it was our combined finances & assets that enabled us to progress in life and realise our dream of buying the house we wanted etc. I have always worked and I manage the finances at home as I am more skilled at that. We balance and combine our income - not one person sacrificing or reliant on the other. I am extremely independent, always have been and previously lived happily alone for many years.

Male and female brains do differ - but as I said, I believe it’s more nurture over nature when it comes to domestic chores etc (seeing the chores, different standards in how and when they are done etc).

Personally I love and respect that my husband will shoulder the load of working longer hours - probably extremely long compared to a lot of people (but he does enjoy aspects of that), and it is important to him to be able to provide for us, which I also respect - so that I don’t have to, as it’s just not my priority in life anymore and he respects that. I work enough hours so we are financially sound but I also get a decent work/life balance. He is not expectant or picky about when or if I do any chores & he has hired a cleaner in the past to, if you like, do his share when he doesn’t get time to.

Male and female brains do differ - but as I said, I believe it’s more nurture over nature when it comes to domestic chores etc (seeing the chores, different standards in how and when they are done etc).

I’m reasonably sure that countless scientific studies have concluded not, but you do you.

Taking the nature v nurture point, this is interesting to explore. What are your sons, and daughters too, learning about the expectations and opportunities for them from what they see?

As I did, my daughter is learning that she has the opportunity to do absolutely anything she likes. That having boobs and periods doesn’t make you naturally good at cleaning, nor should it be a female responsibility to “manage it”. That men can be emotionally supportive and responsible partners and fathers (DH is the first to grab the pre-menstrual chocolate for her because he sees what she needs). That when one partner is absent for any reason the place doesn’t fall apart. That women can centre their work in the same way men can. That male brains can manage the mental load as well as a big job.

I recall asking her when she was about 7 if there was anything the boys on her class could do that she couldn’t. After a minute her response was “pee standing up”. I hope she always feels that way (child bearing aside).

It’s true they (men or women) have to do them whether they work or not. The fact that women are still more likely to do them doesn’t mean they can quantified financially or equated with paid employment.