Unrecognised Contributors: Pay cheques might not be the only gift for mothers

We don’t need more gestures of appreciation; we need a national reckoning about the economic value we create with our bodies and our time, without adequate remuneration or support. The pandemic has laid bare the reality that motherhood is a job. The truth is, it’s many jobs. Even before COVID-19 shuttered schools and forced 2.3 mn women from the work force, women were spending an average of 28 hours a week doing unpaid work — as chefs and private chauffeurs, scraped-knee surgeons and iPad-use mediators. 

Plenty of men are certainly putting in that work as well. But women of all ages and races, income brackets and employment statuses are spending over a third more time on unpaid labor than their male counterparts are. 

Yet women’s labor isn’t valued. Quite literally, unpaid housework isn’t included in the gross domestic product, despite the fact that, according to the IMF, domestic work around the world amounts to anywhere from 10 to 60 percent of G.D.P. And if American women earned minimum wage for their unpaid care-taking and housekeeping work, they would have made $1.5 trillion in 2019. Those hours of unpaid work affect women’s ability to do paid work. In April, Oxfam announced in 2020 alone, women around the world lost $800 bn in income as they lost or left jobs to care for their families. 

Because more than just awareness, acknowledgment and appreciation of women’s labor, mothers need material support. There is a growing movement for means-tested federal stipends for moms. Such direct payments would give women the means to afford child care and re-enter the work force. Money is one way to value unpaid labor, but cash alone doesn’t tackle the insidious notion that motherhood isn’t a real “career” worth compensating. Of course, it is, which is probably why Americans spend about $25 billion each Mother’s Day to thank moms for what they do — but that figure isn’t nearly enough. More than just a financial bandage, we need vast change on a structural, cultural and personal level. 

Eleven senators have introduced a resolution called the Marshall Plan for Moms to advance that kind of change. The plan would deliver affordable child care, robust paid leave and improved access to mental health support to millions of struggling families. President Biden’s recently proposed American Families Plan has the potential to complement and build on the resolution, offering a broader, structural investment in education and child care — as well as tax credits for middle, low-income families with children. 

Should the plans become a reality, the federal government would join a growing number of workplaces in offering much-needed support to mothers and fathers alike. But equity in the workplace is only possible if there’s equity at home, too. Mothers report that they work longer, harder “second shifts” at home than fathers do. For heterosexual couples, it’s a pretty simple equation — if we want to shift some of the burden off mothers, we need to shift more of it onto fathers. Millions of women are also raising children without fathers in the picture because they’re single parents, in same-sex unions or co-parenting with a friend or family member. Altering our outdated conceptions of the roles and responsibilities of a family unit will only reaffirm that every type of family is, well, a family.