Bringing Household Services Out of the Shadows

3. Unpaid housework

Over years of progress in terms of labour market participation, gender roles regarding domestic house‑ and care work have remained remarkably rigid (OECD, 2017[29]). However, the traditional model of the male breadwinner and female domestic work is gradually weakening as most working-age women across the OECD are in gainful employment today. However, despite modest increases in male participation in non-care housework tasks, many women in dual-earner or single households still carry out most unpaid work in and around the house (e.g. Bianchi et al. (2000[30]; 2012[31]), Gimenez-Nadal and Sevilla (2012[32]), Sullivan, Billari and Altintas (2014[33]), Gimenez-Nadal and Molina (2020[34])).

Unpaid work generally refers to services that are performed within a household and which are not offered for sale on the market. This typically includes, cooking, cleaning, laundry, gardening, adult- and child-care, as well as shopping and related travel activities. However, the boundaries between unpaid work and leisure are often blurry. For example, some might think of cooking as a highly enjoyable activity, while others see it as a tedious chore. Nevertheless, such tasks can typically be classified by considering whether a third person could be remunerated to perform the same activity (Miranda, 2011[35]). With cooking this is clear – whether a person cooks for themselves, for other household members, or for a dinner party with friends – each of these activities could be replaced by hiring a cook or paying for a meal in a restaurant, meal delivery or takeout. It is therefore considered as unpaid work, rather than pure leisure.

3.1. The distribution of unpaid housework

The OECD Time‑Use database provides a picture of the time adults spend on a range of activities, including unpaid work (OECD, 2020[36]). Even if not perfectly comparable across countries as years differ – surveys are expensive and many countries hold them once every 10 years, and important nuances in the measurement and categorisations of activities exist, the data do facilitate the cross-national comparison of time spent on paid and unpaid work.1 Among all unpaid activities, non-care housework makes up the largest share of time in unpaid work. This includes re‑occurring non-care tasks in the household, such as cleaning, cooking, laundry, and gardening. Importantly, many of these tasks could be outsourced to household service workers. Nevertheless, in OECD member countries, each day individuals spend on average about 8% of their available time on these tasks (116 minutes), while paid work or study make up 18% per day (262 minutes; note that this accounts for holidays, weekends, part-time work, inactivity etc.) (Figure 3.1). About 6% per day (79 minutes) is spent on other unpaid work, such as shopping, adult- and child-care, as well as travel related to household activities.

Considering the overall time spent on different activities masks substantial differences in time‑use that exist among men and women. While men spend about 22% of their time (311 minutes) in paid work or study, women only do so for 15% of their day (213 minutes). Each day, 11% of women’s total available time (158 minutes) is spent on non-care housework tasks, while men only spent 5% of their time (72 minutes) on these activities. This culminates in a 6 percentage point (86 minute) gap in time spent on non-care housework on average across the OECD. Figure 3.1 shows that this Non-Care Housework Gender Gap varies considerably across countries: it exceeds 13 percentage points in Turkey, where traditional gender norms remain strong (Kagnicioglu, 2017[37]), and is as low as 2 percentage points in Sweden, where gender equality norms have a long history (Evertsson, 2014[38]). While affecting both men and women, the COVID‑19 pandemic appears to have had a profound impact on the gender division of unpaid housework across the OECD (see Box 3.1).

Figure 3.1. Time spent on non-care housework across the OECD

Minutes spent on paid and unpaid work in the OECD and gender gap in time spent on non-care housework, 15‑64 year‑olds, latest available data*

Note: Non-care housework is here defined to concern the following re‑occurring non-care tasks in a household (defined as non-care housework in the OECD Time‑Use Database): cleaning, cooking, laundry, and gardening. Oher unpaid work refers to care, shopping, volunteering and travel related to unpaid household activities. The Gender Non-Care Housework Gap is calculated by subtracting the male time‑use of non-care housework from the female equivalent. Data refers to time‑use of 15 to 64‑year‑olds. Countries for which time‑use survey data is older than 2010 are not shown here. Data refer to 2018 for the United States, to 2016 for the Netherlands, to 2015 for Canada, Turkey and the United Kingdom, to 2014 for Italy, Korea and Mexico, to 2013 for Belgium, Germany, Greece, Luxembourg and Poland, to 2011 for Norway and to 2010 for Estonia, Finland, France, Hungary, New Zealand, Spain and Sweden. Time‑use categories are not always fully overlapping between countries. Exact groupings and definitions can be obtained through the OECD Time‑Use Database in the OECD Gender Data Portal.

Source: OECD calculations based on OECD Time‑Use Database.

Even though many women are in gainful employment today, their disproportionate share in unpaid work makes it less likely for them to spend time in paid work compared to men. Across countries, women engage more in the labour market as their male partners take on more housework and less inequality in the distribution of housework between partners is linked to more equality in the labour market (OECD, 2017[29]; 2017[1]).

Box 3.1. COVID‑19 and unpaid housework

With worldwide school and childcare facility closures and important shifts to teleworking arrangements, the COVID‑19 pandemic affected the amount of housework, its distribution within families, and, perhaps, long-term attitudes towards unpaid housework.

In Italy and Spain, for example, most of the additional unpaid work burden fell on women, even though men increased their contribution too (Del Boca et al., 2020[39]; Farré et al., 2020[40]). This particularly concerned women’s involvement in non-care housework, which disproportionately increased relative to that of men. Unpaid house work also increased in the United Kingdom and the Unites States, but evidence as to whether that led to more egalitarian sharing is mixed (Carlson, Petts and Pepin, 2020[41]; Hupkau and Petrongolo, 2020[42]; Oreffice and Quintana-Domeque, 2020[43]; Xue and McMunn, 2021[44]).

Even if the additional housework burden is on average equally shared between men and women, the pandemic may affect views towards the division of housework within households as well as the distribution of this division across the population. For example, in Germany, the housework burden increased by about an hour for each household and was equally shared between men and women (Zinn, 2020[45]; Kreyenfeld et al., 2020[46]; Hipp and Bünning, 2020[47]). However, because of substantial imbalance in the distribution of housework prior to the pandemic, most women judged the overall division as unfair, while two‑thirds of men thought the opposite (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2020[48]). At the same time, in Germany, the pandemic has moved some households towards extremes of the gender housework distribution, either traditional housework roles in which women take on almost all unpaid housework or role reversals where men take on the majority of unpaid housework (Hank and Steinbach, 2020[49]).

Despite the increased burden for women in many countries, men generally increased their contribution to housework during the pandemic, albeit from an often low base. In the long term, this may shift gender norms around unpaid work as men have become more exposed to the burden of domestic work and primary caregiving (Alon et al., 2020[50]; Hupkau and Petrongolo, 2020[42]).

3.2. The economic value of unpaid housework

Without household work, households would not function, but despite its significance, housework typically remains unpaid and its economic value therefore elusive. In general, household members carry out the housework themselves and the process does not involve any monetary exchange, prices and/or wages. Nonetheless, any decision on cleaning, cooking or doing the laundry explicitly or implicitly weighs the costs of outsourcing against the efforts of own-account housework – a fundamental economic decision. While costs are a significant barrier to housework outsourcing, other barriers, such as availability, quality and reliability of service provision are also important (Williams, Windebank and Nadin, 2012[51]). The decision on whether or not outsource housework cannot simply be related to relative prices.

Measuring the economic value of housework is key to understanding the importance of unpaid domestic work and the associated opportunity costs. Such valuations measure the total economic contribution of housework and therefore the accumulated value of the domestic work men and women perform within their households. Past work by van de Ven, Zwijnenburg and De Queljoe (2018[52]) and Ahmad and Koh (2011[53]) estimated the economic value of overall housework in selected countries, and this report follows and refines these approaches (the text below outlines the main estimation approach and deviations from previous studies).

By and large, the estimates are generated using the OECD National Accounts and OECD Time‑Use data, along with a small number of other OECD datasets (see the notes to Figure 3.2). This report focusses on non-care housework, and thus shifts the focus from unpaid work in general, to the most significant activity therein (see Figure 3.1). A critical component in estimating the economic contribution of non-care housework is the method of valuing the time spent on these activities. Housework can be outsourced to household service providers that relieve household members from these tasks against a price on their labour, thereby creating employment opportunities and economic value. One could thus assume that one hour of unpaid housework would be as valuable as the price of the same hour of housework bought from non-care household service providers (Box 3.2). Time spent on housework is also time potentially foregone in paid employment or leisure. As such, domestic work also holds significant opportunity costs, as the benefits of freed up time – be it through increased income from paid work or well-being – can be substantial. A second approach therefore estimates the market income foregone as a result of engaging in unpaid housework. Importantly, both approaches do not differentiate between the value each man or woman contributes, neither in productivity nor in the value of each hour of work provided, but rather accumulate the total amount of housework performed in a given country (of which women generally provide a larger share).

Box 3.2. Valuing unpaid housework activities

In valuing unpaid work activities, two different approaches of valuation are typically used: one based on replacement costs, the other on opportunity costs. These approaches involve different assumptions on wages and associated tax rates, and thus lead to substantially different results:

• Replacement Cost Approach: This approach constructs a post-tax hourly price for housework activities, based on representative prices for similar activities in the market. In particular, the hourly valuation is based on the average of OECD Purchasing Power Parity survey data for non-care household service activities, specifically for registered and unregistered domestic cleaners as well as cleaning companies. In practice, this comes close to using minimum wages as an approximated value of housework. This approach ignores productivity and quality differences between own-account housework and the work of service providers. While these may be substantial, there is no easy way to take such differences into account and the approaches that do so, typically use arbitrary productivity adjustments in their estimates (Landefeld, Fraumeni and Vojtech, 2009[54]). In line with van de Ven, Zwijnenburg and De Queljoe (2018[52]) and Ahmad and Koh (2011[53]), this report assumes productivity differences to be non-existent.

• Opportunity Cost Approach: This approach constructs a post-tax hourly price for housework activities, based on the average hourly net wage paid throughout the whole economy. This approximates foregone market income when spending time in unpaid housework. In the absence of detailed household level information on hourly net wages, the economy-wide average wage is an approximation, assuming households can fully compensate saved time with gainful employment.

The full estimation framework requires further assumptions on relevant tax rates and social security contributions. The tax rates used here are from the OECD Tax-Benefit Model (version 2.3.0), which offers detailed tax information for various different households constellations (OECD, 2020[55]). In general, the replacement cost approach uses tax rates based on incomes at the lower end of the wage spectrum, while the opportunity cost approach is based on households earning average wages.1

While housework predominately requires labour input, a range of household appliances can substitute or reduce labour input, such as washing machines, dishwashers, microwaves, and others. In particular for women in developed countries, Heisig (2011[56]) shows that technological advances have reduced the time spent on housework. Even though the impact on outcomes is usually small, these appliances therefore need to be adequately reflected in the calculation of the value of own-account production of unpaid non-care housework activities. Under assumptions on the average service life of household appliances, depreciation rates and returns on invested capital, the value of household appliances can be estimated using the Perpetual Inventory Method (PIM) and the OECD National Accounts Data on household consumption expenditure. This report follows the previous approaches of van de Ven, Zwijnenburg and De Queljoe (2018[52]) and Ahmad and Koh (2011[53]) insofar that the capital services considered are based on the following items from the Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose (COICOP): household appliances (P31CP053) as well as tools and equipment for house and garden (P31CP055). In contrast to these previous approaches however, purchases of vehicles (P31CP071) are excluded.

1. The tax rates for the replacement cost approach are based on the average rates for four model households: a single person at 67% of average earnings and no child; a single person at 67% of average earnings with two children; a two‑earner married couple with 2 children, both parents with 67% of average earnings; and, a two‑earner married couple with no children, both parents with 67% of average earnings. The tax rates in the opportunity cost approach are based on two model households: A single person at 100% of average earnings and no child; as well as a two‑earner married couple with two children, one parent at 100% of average earnings and the other at 100%.

Because of the need for underlying assumptions, the resulting estimates need to be interpreted with care and therefore do not fully reflect the real value of housework. In addition, given likely productivity differences between own-account and market production of housework and potential capacity limits in the substitution of time spent on housework with time in gainful employment, the estimates from both the “replacement cost and opportunity cost approaches” may overestimate the economic value of housework. Therefore, all results need to be considered as indicative figures that highlight the importance of unpaid non-care housework for the economy. Figure 3.2 presents estimates on the total value of own-account production of unpaid housework activities in 2018. Both approaches point to the substantial economic value of unpaid housework. The replacement cost method values unpaid housework activities at about 15% of GDP on average across available OECD countries, while the opportunity cost method points to a value of 27% of GDP. The latter method generates limited variation in values – especially among European countries (except Luxembourg, Poland, and Sweden), at around 30% of GDP. As household service prices differ more strongly across countries, there is more variation using the replacement cost method, ranging from 23% Greece and Spain to 8% in Luxembourg. Given that housework is only one part of unpaid work (though by far the largest), the estimates are somewhat lower than the figures in van de Ven, Zwijnenburg and De Queljoe (2018[52]) and Ahmad and Koh (2011[53]), both of which consider all unpaid work.

Nevertheless, the results indicate the importance of unpaid non-care housework. Under the replacement cost approach, the GDP-share of the value created by cooking, cleaning, ironing, gardening and small repairs is, for example, almost as large as the average value added by the manufacturing sector (OECD, 2021[57]).

Non-care housework is unequally distributed among men and women. Hence, Figure 3.2 shows that for both approaches women provide a larger share of the value of housework than men: On average, two‑thirds of the total value is contributed by women. There are considerable cross-national differences: the value of male housework is almost as large as the value of female housework in countries with high gender quality, such as Sweden, but only concerns 10% of women’s contribution in countries with stronger division in gender roles.

The estimates illustrate that women currently create more economic value through unpaid housework than men, and that they would gain much more than men from outsourcing housework to household service providers. Valuing housework is not just an issue of putting a monetary value on an unpaid activity, but also one of considering equality of opportunity in the labour market.

Figure 3.2. The economic contribution of non-care housework

Value of own-account production of unpaid non-care housework activities (% of GDP), 2018

Note: All calculations are based on van de Ven, Zwijnenburg and De Queljoe (2018[52]) as well as Ahmad and Koh (2011[53]). The Replacement Cost Approach constructs a post-tax hourly price for housework activities, based on representative prices for similar activities in the market. The Opportunity Cost Approach constructs a post-tax hourly price for housework activities, based on the average hourly net wage paid throughout the whole economy. The computations use the latest available time‑use data. In the absence of 2018 data for the majority of countries, the calculations thus employ historical time‑use statistics. Countries for which time‑use survey data is older than 2010 or for which one of the methods cannot be computed (e.g. due to missing data) are not displayed here. The time‑use refers to 2018 for the United States, to 2016 for the Netherlands, to 2015 for Canada and the United Kingdom, to 2014 for Italy, to 2013 for Belgium, Germany, Greece, Luxembourg and Poland, and to 2010 for France, Hungary, Spain and Sweden. Time‑use categories are not always fully overlapping between countries. Exact groupings and definitions can be obtained through the OECD Time‑Use Database in the OECD Gender Data Portal.

Source: OECD calculations based on the OECD Time‑Use Database, the OECD Taxing Wages Database, the OECD Tax-Benefit Model, OECD National Accounts Statistics and OECD Purchasing Power Parities.

Note

← 1.  In general, it is more complicated to compare time‑use levels across countries. The share of time allocated to different activities appears to be a better measure than levels, exemplified by the similarity of the share of time spent in unpaid work across countries.