Has “Growth” Really Been “Monetizing Housework?”
For most of human history, families grew or gathered their own food, made their own clothes and shelter, raised their own children, and cared for the ill and elderly in their families or clans. Women and men generally had different roles, but both were vital, and no one received or paid money to keep each other going.
Only as people were pushed off farms and into cities did this change, and then gradually. The separate-but-equal approach to gender roles weakened. Men went out to work for pay, as did variable numbers of women on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. For a time, much of the work of feeding, clothing and taking care of the young and old remained “off the books” and mostly done by women. But it was decreasingly thought of as real “work,” since it didn’t pay real money.
Women Work, Women’s Work, GDP
Then the US, at least , began to see a steady rise in the portion of women holding down paying jobs — sometimes in search of economic independence, sometimes out of economic necessity. From barely over 30% in the late 1940s, the “labor force participation rate” for women in the US, doubled to roughly 60% in the late 1990s, where it stalled out.
What went along with that is something I call “monetizing housework.” By this I mean women taking paying jobs outside the home, of course. Less obviously, perhaps, I also mean households spending more for food prepared by someone outside the home; for childcare and transportation to and from that childcare; for assisted living, nursing homes and other help with care for the elderly. Things women used to do at home for free, and which didn’t count as part of “gross domestic product” (GDP).
It strikes me as plausible — if not likely — that the US has had very little “economic growth” since the 1970s that isn’t attributable to shifting things women used to do for free into the paying economy, where it counts as GDP. Or to put differently, shifting deck chairs on the Titanic. Or eating McNuggets instead of cooking at home. The shift creates lots of plastic trash and spreads diabetes, but is it something that deserves to be called “growth?”
I’m not putting this forward as detailed, data-driven economic analysis. Rather, it’s as a thought experiment of sorts, backed up by some important numbers. A bit like my Closet Theory of World Economics, only more important.
The 20th Century Version
Over the last 40–50 years, even as more women went out to work, US GDP growth rates declined sharply. Growth was often 6% or higher in the post-war 1950s and 1960s, before it settled at around 4% per year in the 1980s and ’90s after the tumultuous 1970s. This century it’s been even lower.
The last quarter of the 20th Century was also a period during which factories were closing down across the US and manufacturing was moving to Asia or Latin America. Many “good paying” factory jobs for men disappeared, even as women were going out to work. For most families, this balanced out at close to zero. That is, inflation-adjusted median US household income (in 2022 dollars) was at just over $61,000 in 1980 when around 50% of adult women worked for pay, and still at roughly $61,000 in the late 1990s, when 60% of women worked for pay.
One way to think about it is that the financial result of women taking paying jobs outside the home was simply to offset the fall in earnings for men who had to take lower-paying “service” jobs when factories closed. Those service jobs were sometimes things women had done before, for free or for low pay — nursing, elementary school teaching, restaurant work. It seems we are unwilling to pay either men or women much to do work that women used to do “off the books.”
What we got was a growing portion of the population involved in taking care of each other for meager pay, basically just enough income to feed themselves and their children, with a little help from government school lunch and foodstamp programs. It’s a way of getting subsistence money into the hands of people who aren’t actually contributing to any increase in the goods and services available to sell in the international markets from which Americans increasing bought their goods. It is just a little side exchange that allows people to get by while they take care of each other — and that gets counted as GDP.
The 21st Century Version
This century, these patterns have become more confused– like so much else about the world. On the GDP side, the dot-com bust of 2000–02 was followed by major plunges in 2009 and 2020, and growth in between was barely tepid.
Median household income finally made substantial gains early in the century, only to fall back to the same old $61,000 vicinity for years after 2008–09. Since 2016, though, including through the Trump presidency and the pandemic, household incomes have been rising and the median is now over $70,000.
The percentage of women in the workforce, in sharp contrast, leveled off around 2000 and has been falling since 2008. Early this year it was at 57%, the lowest since the late 1980s.
It’s hard to make sense of that maze of seemingly conflicting trends. The fact that household incomes held up relatively well even as fewer women held jobs is encouraging. From a gender equity perspective, there has also been a notable, albeit slow, narrowing in the median earnings gap between men and women.
But there’s a disconcerting aspect of that narrowing: Instead of women moving up to meet the income of men, male income has fallen back toward that of women through much of the last 40 years, as men left factories and often moved into occupations once considered women’s work.
Adjusted for inflation, men earned no more in the US in 2019 than they had in 1980. Put another way, women account for virtually all the gains in median real income seen in the US since 1980. Men are still clawing back from deindustrialization.
Let me be clear: Women still earn less than men on average and that’s not fair. Women should earn more than they do and the same as a man doing the same work. That is obvious, at least to me as a lifelong feminist. What I am saying is that it is problematic that the scant “progress” seen by women came at the expense of men rather than as a genuine increase in anything.
Looking Ahead
In the neoliberal era since 1980, corporate earnings have soared, stock markets have soared, and rich people have gotten hugely richer. Everybody knows that. One of the big decisions humanity must make in the energy, economic and social transitions now underway is whether that syphoning off of wealth from the poor to give to the rich should continue — leaving the poor to shuffle around their declining number of deck chairs.
As part of that contemplation, it’s worth asking whether the notion that we have seen little, if any, economic growth for 40 years beyond that attributable to monetizing housework doesn’t cast doubt on the entire way we think about growth. The ways we’ve come to eat, cloth ourselves and care for our children and the elderly as part of that growth process can’t realistically be called an improvement. Life spans have gone into reverse, drug addiction has risen, education is lousy in most places, our short-cycle clothes pollute horribly.
Maybe we should go back to the drawing board and start over in thinking about what we pay for, what we do for free for our family and friends, and whether we need so many jobs that take so much of our time.
