Last year, a Texas man made waves online when he said that he couldn't afford his wife, but not in a way that made her seem like one of the over-botoxed women from "Real Housewives."
What he did was that he computed the salary he should have been giving her for everything she does around the house if she were someone else other than the one he choses to spend the rest of his life with, and he said he did it so that people will not undervalue stay-at-home moms.
Melinda Gates, wife of Bill Gates, shared the same sentiment. She addressed in her annual letter to the Gates Foundation the importance of parenting and how taking on unpaid work makes the economy function.
In the letter posted on Tuesday, she highlighted the fact that women spend hours attending to the children and aging relatives, doing things around the house like cleaning, preparing the food, looking after the kids and their schoolwork, etc. It's hard, unpaid work that is usually done by women in "the gender gap no one is talking about."
In developing countries, the costs of unpaid labor gap are even more devastating, as women in these places spend and extra five or more hours a day on chores. This severely cuts on their education and is the reason that they are less likely to learn how to read. Women's responsibilities in unpaid work have kept them out of the labor force, and although it doesn't seem like a big deal, the lack of understanding of parenting and stay-at-home work has held back economy growth for years.
To solve the problem of this unspoken gender gap, everyone must recognize that unpaid work is still work, said Gates, and that means chores should be redistributed more evenly at home.
Gates shared, "Economists call it opportunity cost: the other things women could be doing if they didn't spend so much time on mundane tasks. It's obvious that many women would spend more time doing paid work, starting businesses, or otherwise contributing to the economic well-being of societies around the world. The fact that they can't holds their families and communities back."
