How economics made women invisible
Long ago our economic system structured women out of the economic frame of reference: this is how it happened, and why it is so problematic.
When the economic frame of reference was defined, it excluded and de-valued the role of women. Yet it has remained completely unchanged to this day. Now, women’s work all over the world remains invisible. Their lack of value in the GDP reinforcing and reflecting their lack of value in society as a whole.
Productive and unproductive
The first culprit is the celebrated Adam Smith, the father of economics, (1723 to 1790).
When he wrote the Wealth of Nations, he ignored was half the population: women. His economic theory distinguishes between ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ labour. Productive labour, he defined as only that which generated wages, profit and rent — and circulated the cash economy — the market. ‘Unproductive labour’ was considered all of the unpaid work of women, and men’s ‘leisure’. So when he talked about how food production contributes to the market, he talked about the contribution of the butcher, the baker and the brewer of beer, but he failed to mention the contribution of those cooking, preparing and serving the food: women.
Who were the women in Adam’s life? He was a bachelor and remained unmarried all his life, but there was one woman he couldn’t have lived without: his mother. Margaret Smith nurtured him from cradle to grave. She had married Adam Smith Senior at the age of 26, and he was 15 years older than her. When he died in 1723, he left her with her two year old son Adam who promptly inherited his father’s estate (she was only entitled to a third). Because Adam Smith never married, she tended to his household from that time on. Her support enabled him to write his economic theories, and yet he couldn’t see past himself to notice her contribution which made it all possible.
What Adam Smith set in motion remained fundamentally unchanged for over 300 years. Today, the growing and processing food, nurturing and educating children and running a household are not seen as productive within the economy.
Cutting women’s work out of the measurements
In the UK and the US, whilst conceptually women were cut out of the economic frame of reference by Adam Smith, it was the introduction and definitions of the census that cemented their place as “unproductive.” The history of the census in the UK and the US shows how gradually women’s work was de-valued and downgraded. So that today, the experiences that are economically visible can be summarized as “what men do”, or at least, what men have done for most of our history to date.
Labour undertaken by housewives gradually got downgraded within the UK census throughout the 19th century. The first census in England and Wales in 1801 attempted to collect information on individuals yet it was unsuccessful. As such, the census of 1811, 1821 and 1831 all inquired after the occupations of families as productive units. In 1851 for the first time, general female occupations were enumerated. In this census there was a class of occupations called “wives, mothers, mistresses,” who were distinguished from a 17th class called “dependents.” Dependents were at that time defined as, “children, the sick and infirm, gypsies and vagrants, and certain ladies and gentlemen of independent means.” This slightly changed in the 1861 and 1871 censuses; and wives and widows were included in “the domestic class” along with scholars, and paid domestic workers. However, by 1881, wives and other women doing domestic work were placed in class that was deemed “Unoccupied.” This Unoccupied class replaced an earlier “Indefinite and Non-productive” category, and began the spiral of housewives being considered as officially unproductive. Then, enter the influential British economist and sexist Alfred Marshall, who recommended that the UK census follow the method of the Germans where the convention was to be more blunt about the whole thing and describe married women plainly as “dependents.” He was listened to, and the 1891 Census restricted the “Domestic Class” to those employed in paid domestic services. Housewives were excluded from this class and they were defined as dependents.
In the United States, the situation for women started out bleaker. The very first 1850 census only inquired after the “profession, occupation, or trade of each male person over 15 years of age”. Then, in 1870 the influential American economist and sexist Francis Amasa Walker took charge of the federal census. His view was that women’s household work was ‘unproductive’ so the term housekeeper was only reserved for women who received wages — the term ‘keeping house’ was given to unpaid domestic labour. All the States followed this Federal model, except one.
Massachusetts remained a feminist exception for a few more years. Unlike in the rest of the United States at this time, in the 1875 State Census of Massachusetts, Housewives and unmarried women who performed unpaid housework were included in the larger category of “Domestic and Personal Office,” along with those in paid employment such as housekeepers, servants, nurses, and washerwomen. Again, in the 1895 State Census of Massachusetts. Housewives and housework were tabulated in “Domestic Service” along with paid work, rather than in the “not gainful,”, “not productive” or “dependent” categories like in the rest of the country. However, by 1905, Massachusetts had surrendered its eccentricity and placed housewives and housework in the “not gainful” class, along with scholars, students, retirees, those unemployed for twelve months, and dependents. The “Domestic and Personal Service” category was limited to those who received a wage or salary for their work. They made the change, but seemed to do so reluctantly.[6] In a footnote to their census, the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor (1889) stated:
“Housewives, … receive no stated salary or wage, but their work is surely worth what it would cost to have it done, supposing that the housewife, as such, did no work at all. There were 372,612 housewives in Massachusetts in 1885, and only 300,999 women engaged in all other branches of industry. If a housewife were not expected nor required to work, then for the labor of 372,612 women, paid service would have to be substituted. Such a demand for labor could not be supplied by the inhabitants of the State itself. Consequently, as the labor of the housewives was absolutely necessary to allow society to exist in its present form, the housewife is certainly “in industry.” As has been stated, she is excluded from the previous tables in this Part for conventional and arbitrary reasons alone. The housewife is as much a member of the army of workers as the clerk or cotton weaver, and too often supplements the toil of the day, “in industry” with household duties performed at home, but outside of the “in industry” classification.”
Despite it being clear that the women were being de-valued and excluded purely ‘for conventional and arbitrary reasons’, it stuck. By the early 1900s, the notion that married women without paying jobs outside of the home were “dependents” had acquired the status of scientific fact in both the UK & USA Census, as well as in Australia.
Invisible women
Today, the majority of un-paid labour is still undertaken by women, and remains economically invisible. Globally 42% of working age women are outside the paid labour force compared with 6% of men because of unpaid care responsibilities.[8] The monetary value of unpaid care work globally for women aged 15 and over is at least $10.8 trillion annually — three times the size of the world’s tech industry.[9] A 2014 survey of 15,000 mothers in the USA calculated that if women were paid the going hourly rate for each of their roles — switching between housekeeper and daycare teacher to van driver and cleaner — then stay at home mums should earn around $120,000 each year and mum’s who head to work each day would earn an extra $70,000 on top of their actual wages.
Because our main economic measure, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), follows the economic convention framed by Adam Smith, it only measures the cash economy and therefore ignores all of this unpaid work. It leads to the situation where housework is “productive” when performed by a paid domestic worker and “non productive” when no payment is involved. Those who care for children in a nursery are “occupied”, yet mothers who care for their own children are “unoccupied.” All of this work has been variously described as: unpaid caring work, the reproductive economy, the love economy, the second economy. Yet, as feminist economist Neva Goodwin has said, far from it being a secondary economy it is actually the ‘core economy.’ It comes first every day, sustaining the essentials of family life with the universal human resources of time, knowledge, skill, care, empathy, teaching and reciprocity. Yet it is economically invisible.
The institutional exclusion of women from the economic frame of reference does not just mean the economic measures are inaccurate, but it leads to massive political mistakes. Governments decide policy based on this sexist economic frame of reference, to all of our detriment. For example, in times of recession, government investment is concentrated on getting better numbers for the GDP so it foolhardily shifts away from spending on childcare and welfare and is concentrates instead on productive capital which shows up on the books. This trend happens internationally as well, it tends to be the basis of “commandments” issued by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) when they are financing or refinancing the debt of “developing” countries.[14] Yet when governments cut budgets for children’s daycare centres, community services, parental leave and youth clubs, the need for care-giving doesn’t disappear: it just gets pushed back into the home and into the invisible sector. This added pressure, particularly on women’s time, can force them out of work and increase social stress and vulnerability. This has multiple knock-on effects for society and the economy alike.
The invisibility of women and labelling of them as ‘unproductive’ was exported to the rest of the world via the national accounts as another tool of colonisation. The UNSNA draws the distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘other’ producers, along a method that assumes a male head of household. Under their definitions, even if she is agriculturally productive, a housewife cannot be a primary producer. The description of primary producers contains stereotypical male roles. As such, echoing the transition seen in the UK and USA, in 1974 the Bangladesh census redefined categories of women’s work from ‘productive economic activity” in the 1961 census to “housewife,” making it unproductive.
Whilst simultaneously ignoring women’s unpaid work, economists want to record women’s oppression in the underground economy. Economists see things like prostitution, sex trafficking, and drug dealing as relevant for growth because cash exchanges hands. They warned that ignoring such activities could make national account statistics “irrelevant” and “hopelessly misleading”. So the economy of ‘graft, greed and sexual slavery’ is included, whilst the same economists conclude that women’s unpaid work is insignificant.
To end the invisibility of all women’s contribution to the economy is the first call of feminist economics. Including women in the economic frame of reference would not just be an important step in rendering women visible, it would mean their work was acknowledged and valued, and crucially it would allow us to make better informed economic choices for the good of society.
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Marianne is an entrepreneur, business and leadership specialist. She is on a mission to de-legitimise the structures and values of the economy as well as traditional business, helping the world to see that a new way is possible. Marianne set up her first company Justice Studio in 2011.
References and further reading
Folbre, Nancy. 1991. “The Unproductive Housewife: Her evolution in nineteenth-century thought”. Signs Vol. 16, №3 (Spring 1991)
Marçal, K. 2015. Who cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? A Story about Economics. Granta: London
OXFAM TIME TO CARE Report 2020
Raworth, K. 2017. Doughnut Economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st century economist. Penguin Random House: London
Waring, Marilyn. J. 1981. If Women Counted: A new feminist economics. Harper & row. San Francisco.
