Home: Unpaid Domestic Labour

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Abstract

Unpaid labour is work that has economic value but is not remunerated. Following industrialisation definitions of paid and unpaid labour became gendered and spatially differentiated. Men worked for money outside the home; women’s unpaid roles as housewife and mother, no longer conceptualised as economically productive, took place in the home. Domestic labour’s value to household and national well-being was obscured, which contributes to women’s material disadvantage. To remedy the invisibility of unpaid work, and to calculate its worth to national economies, the United Nations advocates using time use surveys for compiling satellite accounts to supplement calculations of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

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