But despite all these potential gains, social-infrastructure investment is often overlooked, in no small part because of the data gap when it comes to unpaid work. This gender data gap has led, Nancy Folbre explains, to its ‘pay-off’ being ‘understated’.68 In fact, the pay-off could be huge. In the UK it would generate up to 1.5 million jobs, compared to 750,000 for an equivalent investment in construction. In the US, an investment of 2% of GDP in the caring industries ‘would create nearly 13 million new jobs, compared to the 7.5 million jobs that would be created by investing 2% of GDP in the construction sector’.69 And, because the care sector is (currently) a female-dominated industry, many of these new jobs would go to women – remember that increasing female employment drives GDP.
The WBG found that investing 2% of GDP in public care services in the UK, US, Germany and Australia ‘would create almost as many jobs for men as investing in construction industries [. . .] but would create up to four times as many jobs for women’.70 In the US, where two-thirds of newly created care jobs would go to women compared to only one-third of newly created construction-sector jobs,71 this investment would increase women’s employment rate by up to eight points, reducing the gender employment gap by half.72 In the UK the investment would reduce the gender employment gap by a quarter (a correction not to be sniffed at given it is women’s jobs that have been hardest hit by austerity policies).73
As well as increasing female paid employment (and therefore GDP) by actively creating new jobs for women, investing in social infrastructure can also increase female paid employment by reducing the amount of unpaid labour women have to do. The employment rate of UK mothers with children aged three to five is 6% lower than the OECD average. In 2014, 41% of mothers of children under four were employed full-time, compared to 82% of childless women and 84% of fathers.74 This sex disparity is partly due to societal expectations (enshrined in law via unequal maternity- and paternity-leave allowances) that the mother be the primary carer. But it’s also because of the gender pay gap: for many heterosexual couples it makes financial sense for the woman to be the one to reduce her working hours, because she tends to be the one who is earning less.
And then there’s the cost of childcare. Recent research from the UK’s Department for Education found that 54% of mothers who don’t work outside the home said they would like to ‘if they could obtain convenient, reliable, and affordable childcare’.75 But on the whole, they can’t. Childcare costs in the UK have outstripped general inflation over the last ten to fifteen years,76 with UK parents spending 33% of their net household income on childcare against an OECD average of 13%.77 Unsurprisingly, therefore, the UK has highly unequal take-up of childcare by socio-economic levels, particularly compared to other OECD countries.78 And this also has a knock-on effect on female paid employment: 29% (this rose to nearly 50% of low- to middle-income mothers) of British women told McKinsey that ‘returning to work after having a child is not financially viable – twice the number of men who say the same thing’.79
It was a similar story in New York which, in 2012, was found by Pew Research Center to be the most expensive state in the US for childcare.80 The Center for American Progress found that before the city’s mayor introduced universal preschool ‘more than one-third of New York families waitlisted for childcare assistance lost their jobs or were unable to work’. In Los Angeles, where preschools face steep funding cuts, an estimated 6,000 mothers are set to give up about 1.5 million work hours, costing an annual total of $24.9 million in lost wages.
There is an easy fix to this problem. One study found that, with consistent childcare, mothers are twice as likely to keep their jobs. Another found that ‘government-funded preschool programs could increase the employment rate of mothers by 10 percent’.81 In 1997, the government of Quebec provided a natural experiment when they introduced a subsidy for childcare services. Following the introduction of the subsidy, childcare prices fell. By 2002 the paid-employment rate of mothers with at least one child aged 1-5 years had increased by 8% and their work hours had increased by 231 per year.82 Since then, several other studies have found that the public provision of childcare services is ‘strongly associated’ with higher rates of women’s paid employment.83
Transferring childcare from a mainly unpaid feminised and invisible form of labour to the formal paid workplace is a virtuous circle: an increase of 300,000 more women with children under five working full-time would raise an estimated additional £1.5 billion in tax.84 The WBG estimates that the increased tax revenue (together with the reduced spending on social security benefits) would recoup between 95% and 89% of the annual childcare investment.85
This is likely to be a conservative estimate, because it’s based on current wages – and like properly paid paternity leave, publicly funded childcare has also been shown to lower the gender pay gap. In Denmark where all children are entitled to a full-time childcare place from the age of twenty-six weeks to six years, the gender wage gap in 2012 was around 7%, and had been falling for years. In the US, where childcare is not publicly provided until age five in most places, the pay gap in 2012 was almost double this and has stalled.86
We like to think that the unpaid work women do is just about individual women caring for their individual family members to their own individual benefit. It isn’t. Women’s unpaid work is work that society depends on, and it is work from which society as a whole benefits. When the government cuts public services that we all pay for with our taxes, demand for those services doesn’t suddenly cease. The
