Should unpaid domestic work be paid?
Unpaid domestic work is done mainly by women. They spend three to six hours a day on it, whereas men only spend half an hour a day on average. The estimated economic value of unpaid domestic work done by women and girls is 10.8 trillion dollars. Will compensation for this unpaid work reduce this inequality?
Anne Boring, Assistant Professor at the Erasmus School of Economics and Research Fellow for the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School, reflects on this for the website Quartz. According to Boring, a main concern of compensation is that it can lead to reinforcement of the conventional gender roles, resulting in a reduce of women’s presence in the labour market. The assistant professor adds that as long as there is a gender pay gap, women are still more likely to do domestic work even if it is compensated.
