Lazy and Foolish Men Still Fail to Realize How Much Unpaid Labor Women Do

Although this type of labor is usually devalued, it’s extremely crucial: “If women stopped doing a lot of the work they do unpaid, then the whole economy would collapse,” Shahra Razavi, the chief of the research and data section at UN Women, told CNN.

The UN Women report findings are nothing new; study after study has shown that women’s unpaid labor is both persistent and overlooked by society. This raises an important question: Why? As more women enter the workforce, and gender equality remains an issue that most governments are at least nominally committed to addressing, why has the value of women’s unpaid labor not budged?

Perhaps the most obvious answer is men. “As women have changed their roles and their activities [in the labor market], men have not followed suit in the same extent,” said Silke Staab, a research specialist on the UN Women Research and Data team who managed today’s new report. “While women have increasingly entered the workforce, increasingly working throughout their lives and taking less interruptions, we haven’t seen a similar take-up of men in the domestic sphere.”

Staab is alluding to a fairly obvious point. So-called “invisible labor” is only invisible if those who don’t participate in it — overwhelmingly men — ignore it. To reduce the amount of time women devote to unpaid and devalued domestic work, men simply have to take on some of the workload themselves.

As today’s findings make painfully clear, the men of the world have not stepped up. Still, changing that nearly-three-to-one ratio is not an insurmountable task, nor is it a wholly individual one: It’s something that governments can, and have, directly influenced, in part by instituting inclusive family leave policies that incentivize men and women alike to take time off from work after having a child.

In Sweden, for instance, parents are given 480 days of paid leave for each baby they have. Each parent has the exclusive right to 90 of those days; if they don’t take them, the days will simply expire. In heterosexual couples, this directly incentivizes men to take paid time off for child-care, with benefits that extend beyond mere economics. For men, early exposure to childrearing can ultimately result in far-reaching transformations of societal attitudes towards childcare and gender. In many cases, simply staying home and participating in childcare inspires fathers to take on more domestic and childrearing roles later on, “when everyone gets back to work,” said Staab.

The results of Sweden’s proactive parental care policies are easy to see. “In Sweden, the ratio between men and women’s unpaid labor is only 1.3 times,” said Staab. “That ratio means women are still doing 30 percent more unpaid work than men, but it’s not almost three times as much as men, which is what our global average shows. While the gap remains there and is stubborn, we do see small and gradual progress and we have data on policies that have facilitated the progress.”

There’s still, obviously, a lot of work to be done. To implement massive change in labor relations between men and women throughout Europe, Staab argues for a “fully-planned support system” for childcare and eldercare. For her, any proposed system would also need to include both affordable childcare and paid parental leave.

But even with policies like paid parental leave, once women return to labor markets, there are still many norms and expectations around motherhood and “women’s work,” which are exacerbated by the persistence of the gender pay gap. “Who stays at home when the child is sick, and who puts in the extra hours to advance their career?” asks Staab. Within a labor market that disadvantages women with lower pay overall, it simply makes more financial sense for many women to stay home and engage in unpaid caretaking.

Given these circumstances, Staab said, quite certainly, “A radical systemic shift is needed” — one that recognizes that unpaid labor isn’t merely a woman’s issue, but something that affects men, too, whether or not they realize it.