COVID-19, Household Chores, and The Economy

2020 was a difficult year for all of us around the world regardless of class, caste/race, job roles, or gender. While grappling with a lot of drastic changes, the marginalised sections were as always the ones most affected by the lockdowns and restrictions in mobility. 

Women, to a large extent, had to deal with a lot of increased workload during this time. What I heard and saw around me increasingly was that working women were struggling with taking care of their children who were attending online classes from home, focusing on their profession, as well as managing household chores be it cooking, cleaning, or doing dishes. Men seemed to be slowly realising that housework was indeed a lot of work which never actually gets done and is essential to the smooth functioning of a household. Men seemed to be washing dishes, pitching in with other housework, and handling more responsibilities around the house. While there were men who already did their share of housework prior to the pandemic, those who started pitching in only post COVID is sadly a significant number from what I have seen and heard. This train of thought then led me to mull over another concern I have had in the past few years - the contribution of household chores/work not being accounted for in any country's GDP. 

While it is mostly women who largely remain in charge of or responsible for household chores around the world, their contribution at home is not valued as there is no economic value or tangible number attached to it. The same chores when split and allotted to different house helps including but not limited to baby sitters, cooks, cleaners, etc. will show a completely different picture.

How do we attach economic value to such chores which largely remain intangible? How do you put a value to a mother breastfeeding and nurturing a newborn, having quit her job to focus on her child? How do we enable men and women to jointly share housework and respect everything that the other partner does? How do we get to a stage where the economy takes into account the incredible and invaluable work of housewives (and house husbands) across the world, especially in developing economies? These remain questions that plague me every now and then, especially since March 2020, when a lot of countries went into lockdown.