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If you're a woman, or a man who cares about his mother, sister, or daughter, there's something you need to know. Seventy percent of those living in absolute poverty in our world -- that is starving or on the edge of starvation -- are female. Not only that, in our wealthy United States, women and children are the mass of the poor and the poorest of the poor.
Women are entitled to know that statistically women worldwide are far more likely to be poor than men. Even if you're a guy, this "women's issue" is about your mother and your grandmother. It's about your sisters and it's about the future of your daughters.
Consider that in the United States women over the age of 65 are twice as poor as men in the same age group. And there's a reason poverty so disproportionately hits women. Most of these poor women were, or still are, caregivers. And we've got an economic system that gives no visibility or value to this essential work when it's done in the home.
In fact, according to economists, the people who do the caring work in households, whether female or male, are "economically inactive." Of course, anyone who has a mother knows that most caregivers work from dawn to dusk. And we also know that without their work of caring for children, for the sick, and for the elderly, there would be no workforce, no economy, nothing.
Yet current economic indicators and policies fail to include this work. Measures of productivity such as GDP (gross domestic product) not only include activities that harm and even take life -- such as making cigarettes plus the resulting medical and funeral bills -- but fail to include the life-sustaining activities that contribute the most to human well being. The life-sustaining work of caring for people and maintaining a clean and healthy home environment still performed primarily by women in households is not included as "productive work."
The good news is that we can change this bizarre way of looking at what is, and is not, productive work. In fact change is already in the works.
Already in 1995 the UN Human Development Report estimated that the economic value of the unpaid work of women worldwide is a whopping 11 trillion dollars per year. A 2004 Swiss government survey placed the value of the unpaid work in households at 70 percent of the reported Swiss GDP. And according to salary.com, a U.S. organization, the caring work of a mother is worth over $100,000 per year.
See more stories tagged with: poverty, women, sexism, economy
Riane Eisler is the author of The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics and The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future, and President of the Center for Partnership Studies.
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