"Women continue to be a net drain on the state," read the headline of a Danish magazine I spotted in 2020. The title was stated plainly, as if it was an objective fact that women were taking more than they were giving. According to this article women were a "collective deficit": their salaries were low, so they paid less tax. They tended to do "expensive" things like give birth. Some women even had the nerve to work part time and in the low-paid public sector, further diminishing their "contributions".
You might imagine these claims were being made in a click-bait opinion piece, by some controversial figure looking to stir up debate. If so, you are, unfortunately wrong. The figures cited in the article came from the Danish government’s official Finance Ministry.
Claims like this show up in political conversations all over the world. In 2022, a candidate for Reform UK posted that he was sick of all this complaining from ‘the sponging gender’. The reason he gave was simple economics: "Men pay 80% of tax – women spend 80% of tax revenue. On aggregate as a group, you only take from society," he wrote.
In economics, the only way we have to measure someone’s value to the economy is in money. Cold, hard cash is, apparently, all that matters.
But if all British women were to die tomorrow, would the remaining men be living in splendour with £100 notes shooting from every ATM? Let’s find out.
Careless assumptions
There’s a dirty secret in economics: we have little to no ability to account for all the time and effort it takes to keep people healthy, happy and alive. This means that the people who perform this work, often called care work, tend to be devalued (or to downright disappear) in many economic conversations. This work is sometimes referred to as ‘women’s work’. In fact, the branch of economics concerned with care work is called feminist economics – not because it is only relevant to women, but because there is no country on earth where men do more care work than women. Seventy-five per cent of the world’s unpaid housework is performed by women.
Women make up 76 per cent of everyone who works within the European Union’s paid care sector. Globally, the sector consists of 249 million women, compared with 132 million men. For a long time, ‘women’s work’ has been disregarded, even ridiculed. There is still a tacit assumption built into our economic system: if someone is suffering, there will be a woman, somewhere, who will take care of them for very little or no pay. Surely we are all worse off in a society where care is treated so carelessly? If we want a world with more joy, connection and kindness, that really needs end.
Separating fact from fiction
Economic language is the language of power – and politics. Numbers and graphs, with their ascending and descending lines and digits, parade through news shows and newspaper articles. They appear so certain, as though they spell out unassailable truths. One of these numbers is GDP: Gross Domestic Product. This number counts the prices of everything that has been bought and sold, typically within a year. In shorthand, we often call it ‘the size of our economy’. Most politicians, whether left-leaning or right, will tell us that we need our GDP to grow. It is used as a stand-in value for wellbeing. But that is deceiving in two ways.
Firstly, GDP does not include activities without a price tag. Everything without one is effectively outside of the economy. Anything that we are not paid for is, instead, labelled as leisure. You are either doing paid work or leisure: those are our only two options. Did it feel like ‘leisure’ the last time you were rushing around the supermarket, grabbing milk, some bread, maybe formula or bananas? Or how about dealing with the email from school about head lice, tending to your partner’s health, or doing the dishes in a rush before bedtime? Women spend about twice as much time on these ‘leisurely pursuits’ as men do and that contribution goes unrecorded.
The next issue is that, through the lens of GDP, a trader in London making £10,000 a month will always be seen as more valuable than a nurse making £2,300 – notwithstanding that this nurse might have been the one treating the trader for Covid-19, or making sure his child got safely through a cleft-palate operation. How the nurse relates to her society, what she makes possible for the people around her, is lost in this calculation. She is nothing but her price. Yet care work is, in many cases, the work that makes all other work possible.
As soon as we start thinking about value in this way, numbers often fail us. Yet these models are used by politicians and civil servants to shape policy decisions which affect us all. Since the late 1970s, a lot of the economics used in politics has favoured theoretical and mathematical models over what we actually witness and experience in everyday life – they don’t take illness, death or children into consideration, or the care that is required from (mostly) women in these instances.
The price put on something affects the priority it is given, so things that are difficult to price – care, friends, family, art, and rest – exist in a state of peril. You might recognise this from how we treat nature, which, like unpaid care work, has no price. We can put a price on the impact of, say, building a new shopping mall, but we have no number for the value of the trees, animals and fresh air that we lose as a consequence of erecting it (not to mention the social value lost when we start seeing closures of smaller, local stores!). So one course of action has a number assigned to it, lending it the appearance of solid value, while the other part can easily be dismissed as ‘touchy feely’.
Similarly, cutting council funding to ‘balance the budget’ might look like money was saved, in the short term at least. But in the long term, what will happen to the child who did not get access to a social worker? What will happen to the families now being denied help to care for their disabled children? When the paid care sector is cut and its services disappear from the public ledgers, it looks as if we’ve saved tons of money. But in reality, the need for care remains the same – and it’s often women who are left to pick up the pieces.
Always a woman to catch us
Cuts to the public care sector hit everybody, but the people doing the lion’s share of care work carry the brunt of it. Across the world, women are more likely to be the ones:
1) Employed at the care and educational facilities being cut to the bone, endlessly asked to work harder and do more with fewer resources than before
2) Using these services the most (an American study showed that women were 10 times more likely to stay home with an ill child than men, and five times as likely to go to the doctor)
3) Taking over when the care provided by the state deteriorates to an unsustainable level. Ask any person with a disabled child. 50% of those in income poverty are in a family that supports at least one person with disabilities. From 2022 to 2023, an additional half a million more women took on caring duties for elderly family members.
Women act as a buffer to public cuts, making it seem as if everything is fine and we saved money. In reality, women are scrambling to cover the care gaps created both at home and at work, often at the detriment of themselves, their families and children. In the last decade, the number of unpaid carers spending more than 35 hours a week or more caring for someone has increased by half a million.
Burdensome and beautiful
Care work is difficult, exhausting and devalued in culture and economics. But for many of us, being needed and enriching the lives of others is also what gives our lives value and makes us feel connected. Women have always fought for full lives outside the home, not instead of but as well as the right to care for others with joy and dignity. When caring for others is seen as worthless, as time that would be better spent doing paid work, everyone suffers a tremendous loss.
The children who have grown up in a society where care has been squeezed out of home, workplaces and the state, are starting to come of age – and many of them don’t feel so great about it. From 2017 to 2022, rates of probable mental disorder in young people have risen from 1 in 8, to 1 in 6. Everybody is blaming Instagram, but it might be useful to zoom out and ask ourselves: have we created communities where young people are cared for? Or have we replaced care with the pressures of the optimal factory: increased productivity, human capital and competition? When efficiency and productivity are the ideal, then there is only one way to be human – pulling us towards a smothering sameness. Sadly, ours is not a culture that values every individual equally. It is a society that celebrates above all those who need the least care and those who care the least for others.
Beating hearts in a broken economy
All over the world, economists are talking about a fertility crisis. Could it be that a system based on taking women’s work for granted is collapsing?
In 2024 the UK and Wales recorded the lowest fertility rate since records began in 1938. This should come as no surprise, given that the care needed to rear children is not assigned any value when we make political decisions. This means that the lived reality of being a woman with children is often completely invisible to lawmakers. In 2022, men worked an average of 35.3 paid hours per week, while women worked an average of 27.8 hours per week. But when unpaid work is included, many, many women work more hours: men on average do 16 hours of unpaid care per week, compared to women’s 26. In a precarious housing market where well-paid, secure jobs are hard to come by, perhaps women are now simply refusing to take on that extra work.
Begin to examine just how undervalued all this essential care work is, and it is easy to fall into a state of hopelessness. A lot of people, right around the world, get a lot out of treating this hugely valuable work as a cheap and endless resource. But this way of looking at value was built by people, and it can be changed by people, too. We can start seeing value where we most feel it: in our relationships, our families and communities.
Deficit: How Feminist Economics Can Change Our World by Emma Holten is out now.
