What Women Want
Policymakers want women to join the workforce to boost America’s economic metrics. Ignore them.
By Ivana Greco, homemaker and homeschooling mother of four, as well as a writer
A few days ago, Vice President Vance argued that the “benchmark of national success is not our GDP number or stock market but whether people feel they can raise thriving and healthy families in our country.” He’s got the right philosophy, and more of our leaders should adopt it. One good place to start? Stop blaming stay-at-home moms for holding the economy back.
For years, policymakers across the political spectrum have wanted more women to join the workforce to boost America’s economic metrics. In 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post bemoaning the drop in women’s labor-force participation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, writing: “Studies have shown that our gross domestic product could be 5 percent higher if women participated in the workforce at the same rate as men.” The Biden administration had an explicit goal of increasing women’s labor-force participation. So did the first Trump administration: its first Council of Economic Advisors issued a report titled Relationship Between Female Labor Force Participation Rates and GDP. Readers will not be surprised to learn the Council’s chief concern was that same piece of economic data, concluding that more women in the workforce grows the GDP, and that this is what matters, because “there is much room to bring additional women into the labor force and to grow the economy as a result.” Professor Emily Oster recently summed up this line of thinking in an essay arguing that government should not support stay-at-home parents “because the loss of their tax dollars would have a major negative externality.” Under this analysis, moms (and presumably dads) at home are little more than missing numbers in a workforce data sheet.
This kind of thinking is usually framed as a “women’s rights” issue: rooted in past attempts to remedy the formal and informal discrimination that kept women unjustly out of the workforce. We can and should celebrate women’s incredible educational and workforce achievements over the past century. However, this type of analysis—more women in the workforce leads to better economic metrics, and those metrics are what mean America is better off—is long due for an overhaul. First, it fetishizes these metrics in ways that one of their original creators warned against. Relatedly, it misses the value of what homemakers (both male and female) contribute. While there have been attempts to remedy this gap through the creation of new metrics, these are ultimately unworkable. Most importantly, it leads to policy solutions that prioritize what economists can measure over what they can’t, leaving our country worse off.
To begin with, policymakers have long erred by highlighting economic metrics as the most important indicators of national well-being. Simon Kuznets, who created the calculations that formed the basis of the modern GDP metric, warned one of the most significant omissions of his analysis was that it did not include “the services of housewives and other members of the family,” which are integral to how ordinary people meet their needs. In 1934, the report directed by Kuznets on “National Income” was submitted to Congress, warning that “[t]he volume of services rendered by housewives … toward the satisfaction of wants must be imposing indeed…and this item is thus large enough to affect materially any estimate of the national income.” Kuznets did not try to estimate the value of household work, simply because he had “no reliable basis” to do so. He noted in times of economic contraction, household work tends to expand. Thus, homemaking is a safety net: families do more work at home when the formal economy is doing poorly, and poor families rely more on household labor than rich ones. Even in boom times, homemakers provide significant services in the “satisfaction of wants.” Any analysis that relies on economic metrics alone when considering the value of moving homemakers into the workforce will simply be missing what Kuznets called a “material” factor in estimating our nation’s well-being; a benefit that anyone from any family likely needs no explanation of.
In response to this obvious analytical gap, there have been sporadic attempts to capture the value of homemakers. The Bureau of Economic Analysis, for example, tried to incorporate domestic labor into the GDP. The paper’s authors assigned the value of this work as equivalent to “general housekeeper wages,” calculating that “it would add approximately $3.8 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2010;” an increase of about 25% to our GDP. While that may sound enticing, put another way, it meant the vast amount of labor at home shifts the GDP under this analysis by only a quarter of what we currently observe. The difficulty of trying to assign a numerical value to homemaking is also illustrated by attempts to determine how much a stay-at-home parent is worth annually to a family. These kinds of valuations vary widely, because of the complexity of comparing household labor to market labor. One study found the value of stay-at-home parents is around $18,000 per year. Another recent study found that the services of a stay-at-home parent in a major U.S. city are worth around $3,500 per month: a significant difference.
Ultimately, while such attempts to create metrics for valuing homemakers are well-meaning, they are misguided. I spoke with Talya Emery Silva, the mother of a profoundly disabled child with a rare genetic disorder. She spends her days (and nights) caring for him and homeschooling her other children. He is non-verbal and needs assistance with most activities of daily living, including around-the-clock attention to prevent him from engaging in significant self-harm. There is essentially no long-term institutional care available for children like him; certainly none that his parents would feel comfortable using in their area. In other words, there is no market equivalent for the type of care Ms. Silva provides, and even if there was, how could one put a number on the value of the care provided for a child who will never call her “Mom?”
While the heroic work Ms. Silva is engaged in is outside of the range of normal child-rearing, other parents at home are also doing important work. To take just one example, many members of our armed forces who have young children could not serve our country without a spouse managing the “home front” through the numerous moves and long absences required of military families. We can’t incorporate the work done by a mom or dad at home that enables a soldier to go to war into a GDP estimate, but in many cases, one can’t happen without the other.
Economic metrics are useful indicators of our national economic health and well-being, but they aren’t comprehensive. When I’m trying to tell if one of my children is unwell, a thermometer is a useful tool if he or she might have the flu. If I’m concerned about a sprained ankle, however, pulling out the thermometer does me no good. Similarly, in trying to understand if we are better off with more homemakers in the workforce, our economic metrics can tell us some things, but certainly not everything. The monomaniacal focus by policymakers on these metrics leads them to either undervalue or simply miss the worth of what homemakers do. To take one often-used example, if two mothers on the same street each care for their own children, the GDP is unaffected. But if those same mothers pay each other $100 per week and swap childcare, all of a sudden, GDP increases. In considering what Kuznets called “the satisfaction of wants,” we need a more complex analysis.
This used to be obvious. Throughout most of America’s history, our elites recognized that our prosperity and wealth relied on our homemakers—something mysteriously missing today. Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, famously wrote: “If I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: to the superiority of their women.” Prior to the Industrial Revolution, women’s labor at home was recognized as foundational to the economic health of the new republic as housewives engaged in everything from textile production and farm labor to the types of responsibilities still common for most homemakers today, like child and elder care. Even today, this labor remains important. As one stay-at-home father poignantly told me last year:
Just because I don’t directly participate in the entrepreneurial system through taxable wages doesn’t mean that I only marginally participate in it. My role is simply that of directly competing with business (in terms of efficiency and quality)–I try to find areas where I can personally do it better and more efficiently. And I do the same thing as businesses when I find an area ripe for competition. I acquire capital and raw resources; I combine the capital and raw resources to produce value-added products and services that are provided to the singular market that is my family.
Right now, U.S. economists and policymakers are trying to use the thermometer of economic metrics to determine whether women at home should join the workforce, but that is only one of the tools needed to tackle this difficult job. (Oddly, the same metrics usually aren’t considered when evaluating stay-at-home dads!) These metrics don’t answer important questions like: Are families able to have a parent at home to care for young children if they want? Are families able to successfully care for elders? Do America’s families feel they are flourishing?
Ultimately, we must recognize that metrics alone cannot answer this question. Economists are focused on what they can measure. As V.P. Vance pointed out, America’s leaders need a broader perspective. Even while GDP continues to soar, U.S. families do not perceive themselves as doing well. Every warning light we have is flashing bright red that regular people in America are suffering from the lack of community-building and family-supporting labor her homemakers used to provide. By all means, let’s applaud women who join the workforce, but those at home matter even if they don’t appear on an economist’s labor force spreadsheet.