[ 2016-11-11 ]

Statisticians put value of household chores through the wash
Britain’s statisticians became the ultimate
referees in disputes over household chores on
Thursday when they published an online calculator
that allows people to value the cooking, cleaning,
childcare, gardening and DIY they do.

Using the average wages of those who are paid do
these tasks, the Office for National Statistics
calculator gives an estimate of how much their
unpaid work would be worth if they could find
someone to pay them for it.

In total, the ONS thinks people do £1.01tn of
unpaid work in the home, the equivalent of 56 per
cent of the UK’s gross domestic product, which
values all of the paid work in the UK.

The value of unpaid chores has grown faster than
the size of the economy over the past decade
because the costs of paid childcare have risen
faster than inflation, making it worth more when
done at home.

In the home, women do 60 per cent more unpaid work
than men, the ONS says, and when it comes to
cooking, childcare and housework, they do twice as
much.

On average, men do 16 hours of unpaid work a week
compared with 26 hours for women, with men only
taking the lead role in driving themselves to work
and ferrying the rest of the family around in the
car.

If they were paid for their chores, the average
man would earn £166.63 a week while the average
woman would earn £259.63. The figures suggest
that the chores men tend to do are slightly more
valued in the labour market than those undertaken
more by women.

Childcare, both looking after young children and
teaching older kids, is valued highly at £15.28
an hour and occupies women for over 4.5 hours a
week compared with less than two hours a week for
men.

The gender divide is not the most extreme,
however. Students score as the laziest in Britain
when it comes to chores, doing just 12 hours a
week of unpaid work, while the average mother on
maternity leave does 60 hours a week.

There is little difference between the rich and
the poor. In contrast to the Downton Abbey world
of the early 20th century, the ONS reckons that
rich modern families spend almost exactly the same
amount of time on chores as poorer families. The
only difference is that higher-income households
spend less time cooking and on childcare, but this
is offset by spending more time transporting each
other around.

Source - FT

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