Unpaid Care Work in National Accounts: What's Missing, What's Being Done

The Economy That Doesn’t Show Up

Every morning, before the “real” economy stirs, an invisible one is already running. Someone is feeding a child, bathing an elderly parent, folding laundry, planning meals, packing lunches, checking homework, calming a toddler’s tantrum, and coordinating the day’s logistics for an entire household. This work is productive in every meaningful sense of the word: it creates value, sustains human life, and makes the paid economy possible. And yet, in the system of national accounts that most countries use to measure economic output, none of it counts.

Gross Domestic Product, the headline number that dominates policy discussions, news cycles, and election campaigns, was designed in the 1930s and 1940s to track market production. Its architects—Simon Kuznets in the United States, Richard Stone and James Meade in Britain—were solving a specific wartime problem: how much stuff can this economy produce, and how much capacity is left for the war effort? They were not trying to measure welfare, happiness, or the full range of human productive activity. Kuznets himself warned Congress in 1934 that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.” The warning was politely noted and then ignored for the better part of a century.

What gets left out is not a rounding error. It is an enormous category of productive effort—unpaid care work and domestic labor—that, depending on how you count it, amounts to somewhere between 10 and 39 percent of GDP in the countries where serious measurement has been attempted. The gap is not accidental. It reflects deep assumptions about what counts as “the economy,” assumptions that feminist economists have been challenging since at least the 1970s and that the COVID-19 pandemic made impossible to ignore.

Marilyn Waring and the Birth of a Critique

The most influential early articulation of this problem came from an unlikely source: a young New Zealand parliamentarian named Marilyn Waring. Elected to Parliament at age 23 in 1975, Waring spent a decade grappling with national budgets and economic statistics before publishing If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics in 1988 (published in some markets as Counting for Nothing). The book was part memoir, part polemic, and part technical critique of the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA), the international standard that defines how countries measure GDP.

Waring’s argument was straightforward and devastating. The SNA, she showed, drew a boundary around “production” that systematically excluded the work done disproportionately by women. A farmer who grows vegetables for the market is producing GDP. A woman who grows the same vegetables in a kitchen garden to feed her family is not. A nanny employed by a wealthy household adds to national income. A mother doing the same work for her own children does not. The boundary was not based on any coherent economic principle—it was an administrative convenience that happened to align with patriarchal assumptions about whose work matters.

Waring traced these assumptions back through the history of national accounting, showing how the exclusion of household production was debated and decided at key moments—and how, at each turn, the people making the decisions were men who took for granted that someone else would cook their meals and raise their children. Her book sparked a generation of research, and it remains the starting point for anyone trying to understand why the world’s most powerful economic statistic is blind to a huge category of human labor.

What “Unpaid Care Work” Actually Includes

The phrase “unpaid care work” covers a wide range of activities, and getting precise about what it includes matters for measurement. At its core, the concept encompasses two overlapping categories.

Direct care involves the hands-on tending of people who cannot fully care for themselves: infants, young children, the elderly, people with disabilities, and the sick. This includes feeding, bathing, dressing, comforting, supervising, helping with mobility, administering medication, and providing emotional support. It also includes the “worry work” and planning that goes with care—scheduling doctor’s appointments, researching schools, staying awake with a feverish child.

Domestic labor involves the maintenance of the household itself: cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, household repairs, managing finances, and the increasingly recognized category of “mental load”—the cognitive work of keeping track of what needs to happen, when, and by whom.

Together, these activities constitute what feminist economists sometimes call social reproduction: the daily and generational process of maintaining human beings and producing the next generation of workers, citizens, and human beings. The concept is older than Waring; it traces back to Marx and Engels, who acknowledged that the reproduction of labor power was essential to capitalism even as they focused their analysis elsewhere. But it was feminist scholars—Silvia Federici, Nancy Folbre, Diane Elson, and many others—who made social reproduction a central analytical category.

The gendered distribution of this work is stark and persistent. Across the world, women do roughly three times as much unpaid care work as men. In some regions—parts of South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa—the ratio is closer to ten to one. Even in the most egalitarian Scandinavian countries, women do significantly more. The gap narrows with education and income, but it never closes. When paid work and unpaid work are combined, women in most countries work longer total hours than men, a pattern that the economist Diane Elson has called the “double burden.”

Measuring the Unmeasured: Time-Use Surveys and Satellite Accounts

If unpaid care work doesn’t appear in GDP, how do we know its scale? The primary tool is the time-use survey: a systematic study in which a representative sample of a population records how they spend their time, typically in 10- or 15-minute intervals over one or more days. Time-use surveys have a long history—the Soviet Union conducted early versions in the 1920s—but they became widespread in OECD countries in the 1990s and 2000s, and are now conducted in many developing countries as well.

The data from time-use surveys reveal the sheer volume of unpaid work. The OECD’s compilation of time-use data shows that, across member countries, unpaid work accounts for an average of about 33 percent of total work hours—roughly equivalent to the entire manufacturing sector in most economies. In countries like India and South Africa, where surveys have reached rural populations, the figures are even higher.

But hours alone don’t capture economic magnitude. To produce a number comparable to GDP, economists use one of three valuation methods:

The replacement cost method asks: what would it cost to hire someone to do this work at market rates? If you value a caregiver’s hours at the going rate for a home health aide, and a cook’s hours at the rate for a restaurant cook, you get one number. If you use a single “generalist” rate (the wage of a domestic worker), you get a different, usually lower number.

The opportunity cost method asks: what could the person doing the work have earned in the labor market instead? This method tends to produce higher valuations, especially for well-educated women who have stepped out of high-wage careers to provide care.

The output-based method tries to value the goods and services produced (meals cooked, children supervised, clothes laundered) at their market equivalent. This is the most technically demanding approach and is used less frequently.

The results vary with the method, but the order of magnitude is consistent. The OECD has estimated that unpaid household production is equivalent to between 10 and 39 percent of GDP across its member states. A 2020 study by Oxfam estimated the global value of unpaid care work at $10.8 trillion per year—more than three times the revenue of the global tech industry. The McKinsey Global Institute has put the figure at $10 trillion, or roughly 13 percent of global GDP.

Some countries have taken the additional step of creating satellite accounts—supplementary statistical frameworks that sit alongside the main national accounts and attempt to value household production. Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and several European countries have produced satellite accounts for household work. These accounts don’t change the official GDP figure, but they make the invisible economy visible in a form that statisticians and policymakers can use.

The COVID-19 Reckoning

If time-use data provided the evidence, the COVID-19 pandemic provided the political moment. When schools and daycare centers closed, when hospitals filled and elderly relatives needed shielding, when the entire infrastructure of paid care shrank overnight, the burden fell overwhelmingly on women—and the consequences were immediate and measurable.

Women left the labor force at dramatically higher rates than men. In the United States, women’s labor force participation fell to its lowest level since the 1980s in early 2021. In many countries, women who kept their paid jobs also absorbed a surge in unpaid care responsibilities, as school closures alone added an estimated average of 5-7 hours per week of childcare per parent. The effects were not evenly distributed: low-income women, women of color, and single mothers bore the heaviest burdens.

The pandemic revealed, in a way that decades of academic argument had not fully managed, that the paid economy rests on a foundation of unpaid care. When that foundation cracked, the entire edifice wobbled. Employers discovered that “productivity” depended on someone, somewhere, taking care of children. Governments discovered that their fiscal stimulus packages were less effective when workers could not work because they had no childcare. The revelation was not new to anyone who had read Waring or Folbre, but it was new to many policymakers and commentators who had treated care as a private matter rather than an economic infrastructure.

The pandemic also accelerated interest in what feminist economists had long called for: social infrastructure investment. The term, popularized by the UK Women’s Budget Group and economists like Diane Elson and Susan Himmelweit, draws an analogy between physical infrastructure (roads, bridges, broadband) and the systems that support human well-being (childcare, eldercare, healthcare, education). The argument is that investment in social infrastructure is not consumption—it is investment that raises productivity, enables labor force participation, reduces inequality, and generates employment (care sectors tend to be more labor-intensive than construction, meaning more jobs per dollar invested).

What Policy Looks Like

The policy implications of taking unpaid care work seriously are substantial, and they range from the statistical to the structural.

Better measurement is the starting point. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals include a target (5.4) to “recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household.” This has led to expanded time-use surveys in many developing countries, new efforts at satellite accounting, and growing interest in “beyond GDP” frameworks that incorporate care work alongside environmental sustainability and other dimensions of well-being.

Universal basic services is one policy response that has gained traction. Rather than relying on cash transfers alone, this approach argues for public provision of essential services—childcare, eldercare, healthcare, education, housing, and transport—that reduce the volume of unpaid work and make its distribution more equitable. Proponents like the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity argue that universal basic services are more cost-effective than universal basic income at achieving the same welfare outcomes, partly because they directly address the care gap.

Paid leave policies—parental leave, family leave, sick leave—are another lever. The design matters enormously: policies that reserve leave for fathers (as in Iceland’s “use it or lose it” model) are far more effective at shifting the gender distribution of care than policies that offer leave to “either parent,” which in practice is overwhelmingly taken by mothers.

Public investment in care infrastructure has been championed by a wide coalition of economists. The International Labour Organization has estimated that investing 2 percent of GDP in the care economy could create 40 million jobs in the United States alone, while generating a further 23 million jobs through multiplier effects. Similar estimates exist for Europe and developing countries. These investments are increasingly framed not as “social spending” but as economic strategy—on par with investment in digital infrastructure or clean energy.

Social protection floors—minimum levels of income security, healthcare, and support for the elderly and disabled—address the vulnerability of unpaid caregivers who, because their work is not recognized as work, often have no pension rights, no unemployment insurance, and no safety net when they age out of caregiving or when the person they care for dies.

Why Feminist Economists See This as Foundational

It is tempting to treat the measurement of unpaid care work as a niche concern—an interesting footnote to the “real” debates about monetary policy, trade, and growth. Feminist economists argue strenuously that this framing is backwards.

The invisibility of care work is not a minor oversight in an otherwise sound accounting system. It is a structural feature that distorts our understanding of the economy at every level. If care work is invisible, then policies designed to maximize GDP will systematically undervalue activities that sustain human life. Tax systems will penalize caregivers. Labor markets will treat the ability to work long hours outside the home—an ability that depends on someone else providing care—as a neutral measure of productivity rather than a gendered privilege. Trade agreements will liberalize markets for goods and financial services while ignoring the care systems that make those markets possible.

Nancy Folbre, one of the most influential economists working in this area, has argued that the invisibility of care creates a “free rider” problem at the heart of capitalism. Employers benefit from a workforce that was raised, fed, educated, and emotionally sustained by caregivers—but they bear none of the costs of that caregiving. The result is a systematic transfer of value from the unpaid economy (disproportionately female) to the paid economy (disproportionately male and corporate). Folbre calls this “the invisible heart,” a deliberate echo of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

Diane Elson has made a related argument about macroeconomic policy. Standard macroeconomic models, she points out, treat the labor supply as a given—a certain number of workers with certain skills, available for employment. But where does that labor supply come from? It comes from decades of care work: pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, child-rearing, education, healthcare, nutrition, and emotional support. When austerity policies cut public spending on health and education, the work doesn’t disappear—it shifts from the paid economy (nurses, teachers, social workers) to the unpaid economy (mothers, grandmothers, daughters). The fiscal savings are real in the national accounts; the human costs are invisible in the same accounts. This is not a coincidence. It is a feature of a measurement system that treats care as a free input.

The Limits of Counting

Not all feminist economists are satisfied with the project of valuing unpaid care work in monetary terms. Some worry that the effort to put a dollar figure on caregiving reduces it to a commodity—that by asking “what is this work worth in GDP terms?” we accept the premise that GDP-style valuation is the appropriate measure of worth. Feminist scholars like Julie Nelson and Irene van Staveren have argued for a broader rethinking of economic methodology that questions the centrality of money-metric valuation altogether.

Others raise practical concerns. Replacement-cost valuation, the most common method, implicitly assumes that paid care workers and unpaid family caregivers produce equivalent services. But a mother’s care for her own child is qualitatively different from a nanny’s care—not necessarily better or worse, but embedded in a web of emotional attachment, obligation, and identity that resists simple substitution. The act of valuation, these critics argue, is useful for advocacy but may distort the very thing it tries to capture.

These are real tensions, and they are unlikely to be fully resolved. But even skeptics tend to agree on the practical point: whatever the philosophical complications, the current situation—in which a vast category of productive human effort is simply absent from the numbers that guide policy—is worse than any imperfect attempt at measurement. The choice is not between a perfect account and a flawed one; it is between a flawed account and no account at all.

Where Things Stand

The movement to recognize unpaid care work in national accounts has made significant progress since Waring’s book, but it remains far from its goals. Time-use surveys are more widespread than ever, but many countries still conduct them infrequently or not at all. Satellite accounts exist in a handful of wealthy nations but have not been adopted as standard practice. The UN’s System of National Accounts was revised in 2008 and again in ongoing consultations, with some expansions to the production boundary, but the core exclusion of unpaid household services for own consumption remains.

The political economy of the issue is instructive. Better measurement of unpaid care work would, by itself, change no one’s life. But it would change the conversation. It would make it harder to describe cuts to childcare funding as “fiscal discipline” without acknowledging that the work is being transferred, not eliminated. It would make it harder to celebrate GDP growth while ignoring the unpaid labor that underpins it. It would, in short, make the invisible visible—and visibility is the precondition for political action.

Marilyn Waring understood this from the beginning. “What gets counted counts,” she wrote. The corollary is equally true: what doesn’t get counted can be ignored, exploited, and taken for granted. The feminist economics of care is, at bottom, an argument about what we choose to see—and what we choose to see shapes what we are willing to change.