Why Household Production Needs a Price

The triangular kitchen was born during the 1940s. It placed the refrigerator, the cooktop stove, and the sink within 4 to 9 feet from each other.

As a result, many of us assumed that the triangle let women take fewer steps:

Especially because yesterday was International Women’s Day, we need to say that women should not be the only people walking in triangles.

However, according to U.S. and OECD statistics, we are.

Household Production

Feminist economist Nancy Folbre tells us that the the patriarchal institutions in the U.S. and other high income countries could be diminished if men had more household obligations. But, by looking at the Satellite Accounts maintained by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) you can see they do not. Satellite accounts cover activities excluded by the GDP. As a result, in a list of the kinds of house work they cover, we would see cooking and caring for children, shopping, and cleaning the home.

At home, not employed and employed women have many more hours of home obligations than men:

You can see that women most do the child care and cooking:

While men tend to garden and do odd jobs, the number of hours is far smaller than for child care and cooking:

Correspondingly, the OECD conveys the same message. This infographic shows women doing vastly more unpaid work than men in OECD countries. The numbers indicate minutes per day::

Our Bottom Line: Quantifying Home Production

Without household production, 2020 GDP was $20.9 billion. With it, we leap to $26.2 billion.

GDP origins

Household production has been a dilemma for government statisticians since the 1930s when a group of economists led by Simon Kuznets wanted to quantify the nation’s economic contraction. They felt that if they knew the value of current output, they could figure out potential output, and then connect the two. The results of their research was national income accounting and the groundwork for calculating the GDP. But what to count? Finally, they said, include only legal goods and services that people bought and sold. Household work that had no price, because it had no price, would be excluded.

Valuing Women’s Work

We only began to count more of what women gave to the GDP when they entered the labor force. In The Price of Everything, NY Times journalist Eduardo Porter tells us that when women worked outside the home, they became more “valuable.”

I wonder also if house work and the people who do it would become more valuable if it were quantified. In a 1995 BusinessWeek column, Nobel Laureate Gary Becker (1930-2014) suggests that by including house work in the GDP, it would more accurately reflect production and boost “raise the self-respect of women and men who stay at home to care for children and do other housework.”

Where does this leave us? “We treasure what we measure.”

My sources and more: Thanks to a past newsletter from Melinda Gates for citing the role of the triangular kitchen. From there, we could take the leap to household production statistics from the U.S. and the OECD, I also recommend taking a look at Eduardo Porter’s The Price of Everything and Nancy Folbre’s The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems. But instead of the book (or in addition to it) this Folbre interview was superb. Also, we should note that although our data reflect Covid lockdowns and work-at-home constraints, they also let us look at the division of labor.