On October 24, 2023, more than 100,000 women and non-binary individuals in Iceland staged a historic strike, the first of its kind since the 1975 Women’s Day Off (kvennafrídagurinn), to spotlight issues of gender pay disparity and violence against women. Despite progress, Icelandic women still face a 21% earnings gap in some professions, and over 40% have encountered gender-based or sexual violence.
These strikes, separated by nearly half a century, underscore the broader significance of women’s work. Women’s contributions enhance productivity, promote economic diversity, income equality, and bolster economic resilience. In the United States, women’s labor alone adds a staggering $7.6 trillion annually to the nation’s GDP. If all paid working women in the U.S. were to take a day off, akin to their Icelandic counterparts in 1975 and 2023, the country would suffer an approximate $21 billion GDP loss.
However, women often find themselves constrained from participating in paid work due to the demands of unpaid labor. Unpaid labor, as defined by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), encompasses non-remunerated activities related to domestic responsibilities, including childcare, eldercare, housework, cooking, cleaning, laundry, and shopping. Despite its essential role in maintaining households, unpaid labor remains invisible, unaccounted for in a nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) calculations or economic growth assessments. As highlighted by The New York Times, valuing unpaid labor proves challenging due to traditional expectations that tasks like caregiving should be carried out freely within families, obscuring the genuine economic worth of this work.
Estimates of the “true economic value” of this unpaid labor paint a striking picture, reaching approximately $10.9 trillion globally. In practical terms, if women worldwide received minimum wage compensation for every hour of their unpaid work, they would have contributed this substantial sum to the global economy in 2020—more than twice the size of the global tech industry that year, which stood at $5.2 trillion. In the United States alone, women would have collectively earned around $1.5 trillion for their unpaid labor in 2019.
Regrettably, women’s health bears the brunt of this unpaid labor. Engaging in unpaid labor tasks such as cooking, cleaning, laundry, and lifting heavy objects carries inherent physical health risks. Beyond the physical toll, the cognitive and emotional involvement required, coupled with the lack of respite, can lead to psychological and emotional distress. This includes anxiety, depression, burnout, feelings of devaluation, isolation, loneliness, resentment, increased levels of objective stress (elevated cortisol levels), and perceived stress. A 2022 systematic review observed that these mental health conditions resulting from unpaid labor disproportionately affect women compared to men. It noted that “women carry the greater mental load of household labor; therefore, one unpaid hour is considered denser and more impactful for women than for men.”
In conclusion, the profound economic and health impact of unpaid labor underscores the urgent need for recognition and equitable redistribution of this essential work, emphasizing its significance in achieving gender equality and societal well-being.
