Restitution for Women’s Unpaid Work

One of the most universally enduring forms of discrimination holds that women’s work has lesser monetary value than men’s work or indeed has no monetary value at all.

For centuries women have laboured in the home, with children, family and in the community without pay. Their work has never been included in the GDP or economic statistics. Quite the opposite. It has remained invisible because it is not considered a contribution to a nation’s economy. It is just something that women have to do. And because it is women doing this labour it devalues both the labour and the women performing it. The consequences of these practices have been to rob women of an income, and with it, independence, freedom, social status and even health and longevity.

But now we can quantify the value of women’s unpaid work.

Leonora Risse Associate Professor in Economics, University of Canberra has conducted  new research that puts a dollar value on what all this unpaid labour is worth to the economy. 

Here are some of the astonishing figures she revealed;

1. Women’s unpaid labour is worth the equivalent of $427.3 billion per year. Men’s unpaid work amounts to $261 billion. 
2. All this unpaid labour is worth about A$688 billion to the economy. That is equivalent to around one-third of GDP – and is mostly contributed by women.
3. The average woman does $40,092 in unpaid labour a year.
4. 55% of women’s labour contribution to the economy is in the form of unpaid work and care, compared with 31% of men’s.
5. When women’s unpaid labour is included, women’s share of total labor in the Australian economy rose from 36.8% (when only formal, paid work is counted) to 50.5% when corrected for systemic distortions – including the devaluation of women’s work and the wage premium men earn across roles and industries.

Women hold up half the Australian economy, but they still remain invisible as an unpaid productive workforce.

Restitution for Older Women

Australian older women are now experiencing a national crisis as a direct result of this failure to recognise and remunerate women for their work. A third of Australian women are over 50. This is the demographic that is presently experiencing the greatest levels of unemployment, homelessness and poverty.

Decades of unpaid work, reduced time in the workforce due to caring work and part-time work together ensure that women age into poverty. Older women are the first to be fired and the last to be hired. There is rampant prejudice against hiring older women. Therefore they spend the longest periods on Jobseeker. Their superannuation is a fraction of that of their male peers and they usually cannot survive on it alone. 

Which brings us to the question of how are they to survive for the decade or two until they qualify for the pension or can access their super?

Now that Professor Risse has developed the methodology for quantifying women’s unpaid labour, we need to use these tools to tackle the crisis facing older women. These statistics need to be translated into Government policy.

I would argue that older women are entitled to financial restitution for their decades-long unpaid labour that benefited the economy.

Since women have contributed throughout their lives to the national economy then this contribution should be valued as wages withheld.

This monetary value could be recognised as a ‘shadow’ super and paid back to older women experiencing great hardship. 

Significantly, the same reasons for the Government giving pensions for women over 67, also apply for women over 50. That is, “recognition of contributions to society and a commitment to supporting vulnerable citizens” and “to stop older Australians from falling into poverty as they age and can no longer earn income”.

It could be one effective measure to avoid the escalating catastrophe already afflicting hundreds of thousands of Australian women who, despite a lifetime of work, are ageing into destitution.

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