"I have the biggest cock in the building," Judith Regan, the United States' most feared businesswomen, used to shout from desk at the publishing house she ran.
We're starting to become the men we used to want to marry, the women's movement triumphantly exclaimed in the 1970s. Women went from wanting to have a man to wanting what men had. In spite of the progress that this implied, the project was still about the same thing: men.
"We did it!" the Economist magazine exclaimed on the cover of its New Year's issue in 2010. Women had overtaken men and now made up the majority of all university graduates in OECD countries. In most wealthy countries, more women than ever are entering the workplace. They are running companies that had previously treated them like second-class citizens.
But the very notion of a full-time career is still built around full-time domestic help. Today, women are supposed to work full-time, but full-time help is only available those no can afford it. Who cleans the cleaner's house? Who takes care of the nanny's daughter? These aren't just rhetorical questions, they are issues where the answer can only be found by following a complicated network of care wrapped around the global economy.
Today, over half of the world's migrants are women. In certain countries this numbers reaches between 80 and 90 per cent. There lives are made up of long workdays and low wages. Housework is difficult. Isolated and unregulated. She often lives where she works – in someone else's home. She is part of the family – but also not.
The quality of her work is decided to a large degree by the relationships she has been able to form. If she bonds with the family, she'll be a better nanny. The children will see her more on than Mum, and definitely more than Dad. In some cases, they'll love her. But if she bonds with the family it will be more difficult when it's time to renegotiate her salary and terms of employment. It will be almost impossible to separate the roles. Is she working out of self-interest, out of love – or both?
The employer often thinks that they can take advantage of this predicament.
If the nanny does a poor job, she'll have failed, but if she does too good a job she'll also have failed. If the children grow more attached to her than to Mum and Dad, Mum and Dad won't be pleased. The nanny's career will be short-lived. It's a difficult balancing act.
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The working hours of domestic labourers around the world are among the longest, most precarious and most unpredictable of any jobs on the labour market. Many women in this sector aren't allowed to leave the house without permission, according to a study conducted by Human Rights Watch. Verbal, physical and sexual harassment is common, but seldom reporter. Moreover, such a worker is often in the country illegally and afraid of being deported. She worries almost all the time. Mostly about her children on the other side of the planet.
This is one side of the equation.
The other is that a Filipina housekeeper in Hong Kong earns as much money as a male doctor in the rural Philippines. And that foreign nannies working in Italy have a salary that is between seven and 14 times higher than what they could earn in their home countries. Are they victims? If so, compared with whom?
In this way, she provides for herself and her family. It gives her power. Over her father and her ex-husband. Power and freedom. The money that female migrants send home contributes more to the economy of many countries than aid and investments combined. In the Philippines it accounts for 10 per cent of GDP.
On the other hand, if a cleaner's hourly wage doesn't continue to be markedly less than the hourly wage of the person who would otherwise be doing the cleaning (the women in the Western family), then it won't be economical to hire domestic help. The situation, in other words, implies a continued inequality between women.
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The woman has entered the paying job market, and she has been able to buy herself free from doing large portions of the housework. She had to. If you're going to have a career you check your family life at the door when you arrive at the office. Time to perform, time to be selfish. Time to lean in. But to what?
The job market is still largely defined by the idea that humans are bodiless, sexless, profit-seeking individuals without family or context. The woman can choose between being one of these, or being their opposite: the invisible and self-sacrificing one who is needed to balance the equation.
And often her situation makes this decision for her.
The feminist economist Marilyn Waring looked at the unpaid labour carried out by a young woman in the Lowveld in Zimbabwe. She wakes up at 4am to carry a bucket 11 kilometres to the well and back. Three hours later, she has returned home with the water. Still barefoot. Collecting wood, washing dishes, cooking lunch, doing the dishes again and then out to get vegetables. Fetching water a second time, dinner, younger siblings needing to be tucked in and the workday is over at 9pm. According to the economic models, she's unproductive, not working, economically inactive.
Mincing the meat, setting the table, drying the dishes, dressing the children, driving to school. Sorting the rubbish, dusting the window ledges, sorting the dirty laundry, mangling the sheets, repairing the lawnmower, getting petrol for the car, picking up books, clearing away the Lego, answering the phone, vacuuming the hall, doing homework, washing the floor, cleaning the stairs, making the beds, paying the bills, scrubbing the sink and tucking in the children.
The main argument for not including housework in GDP is usually that it doesn't matter. The amount of housework will always be the same in a society. But how can economists know this if they never include it in their statistics?
A woman in our world spends just over two-thirds of her working day on unpaid work. The equivalent statistic for men is one quarter. In developing countries with large agricultural sectors, the difference is even greater. In Nepal, women work 21 hours more each week than men. In India, about 12.
In parts of Asia and Africa where men often migrate to the cities, women are left behind. They have no support from men or from the state, but still they have to manage the triple burden of a career, housework and agricultural work.
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Economists sometimes joke that if a man marries his housekeeper, the GDP of the country declines. If, on the other hand, he sends his mother to an old-age home, it increases again. In addition to the joke saying a lot about the perception of gender roles among economists, it also shows how the same kind of work can be counted or not counted as part of the GDP.
When married women entered the workforce, they started to devote more time to the kind of work that is counted (working outside the home) and less time to that isn't (domestic work). This dramatically increased the GDP in the Western world. But is this increase accurate? Because no one had bothered to quantify housework, we might have overvalued the actual increase of wealth. Indeed, washing machines, microwaves and mixers have made housework less time-consuming – so the difference isn't necessarily that great. But the point is that we don't know.
If you want the full picture of the economy you can't ignore what half of the population is doing half of the time.
Katrine Marçal is the lead editorial writer for Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet. This is an excerpt from her award-winning book Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?, which is published in Australia by Scribe.
