Sarah Harte: Why does it boil down to who cooks the dinner?
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Over the recent holidays in between being sick and peeling potatoes, I read by Swedish economist Katrine Marçal which made me think of the upcoming referendum on removing the constitutional reference to the role of women in the home.
Marçal’s book felt particularly resonant given that it was Christmas. After all, behind every good meal, is somebody peeling the potatoes. How often is that a woman?
In about nine weeks we will be asked as part of two referenda, whether we should replace the reference to “a woman’s life within the home” by deleting Article 41.2 and inserting a new Article 42B with a more gender-neutral phraseology recognising family care.
On changing the reference to a woman’s life within the home Equality Minister Roderic O’Gorman said last month that “the key is that women choose the roles they play in our society”. In theory, that sounds great, but in reality, the decision is often illusory.
So back to Marçal’s book. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, declared that economic man’s actions were motivated by self-interest. Women didn’t enter into his calculation because their work belonged in the realm of love, care, and empathy which were hived off from so-called economic actions.
In 1776 he famously wrote: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own interest” — meaning these economic actors produced these goods not to please people from altruistic reasons but to make profit from their efforts.
It’s an understatement to say that Smith’s ideas had far-reaching effects on how both our economies and societies developed. He focused on both how goods were produced and how men acted in the marketplace but entirely neglected to consider the huge economic contributions made to society by mothers. There’s an irony here, given that as a lifelong bachelor Smith lived with his mother until her death.
Hiving off caring functions as belonging to the realm of altruism was to have huge economic consequences for women.
As Katrine Marçal writes in her book: “How do you get your dinner is the fundamental question of economics and even if Adam Smith wrote that the answer is self-interest, his mother made sure food was on the table every night and cared for him when he had a fever.”
The caring functions of mothers and their contribution to the economy were to be more or less ignored for another 250 years.
Last year, Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize for Economics for advancing our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes. She showed why women earn so much less money than men, exposing the key drivers of gender differences in the labour market. It all begins when we have our first child. There are underlying barriers that prevent women from doing as well as men economically and Goldin exposes these.
Despite Goldin’s groundbreaking work, economic measures like GDP or gross domestic product which measures the monetary value of a country’s goods and services continue to ignore women’s huge invisible contribution.
The last time I wrote on this subject in early 2023, a disgruntled male friend harrumphed that I had been unfortunate enough to run in unenlightened circles but that a lot of men were doing a great job in caring and domestic work.
I’d like his wife’s opinion. And the statistics don’t back him up because, as Katrine Marçal writes, while woman has entered the job market, man has not entered the home to the same extent.
Oxfam said that the economic measure of GDP was both “anti-feminist and colonial”.
“Women are rendered to the private sphere and their work is invisible,” Oxfam said echoing Marçal’s sentiments. Since as far back as the 1950s feminist economists have been advocating for changing the way we measure a country’s wealth by adding household production including cooking, cleaning, and childcare to GDP but no dice.
It’s absurd that domestic work regardless of who performs it is still outside of and unrelated to supporting the economy. And that this work is economically unmeasured, uncounted, and unrecognised in the sense that it's unpaid and uncompensated.
We neither pay women (or people) when they stay at home and perform a caring role or even stamp them so they will be entitled to a state pension despite the massive contribution they make to society.
As Marçal writes: “However you look at the market, it is always built on another economy. An economy that we rarely discuss.” Supposedly our upcoming referendum will achieve a greater gender balance but will do no such thing. Instead, it’s another slap in the face for Irish women.
Maybe if we compensated workers for caring work economically, incentivising people to do it, the parameters of care would change and more men would do it and, in that way, the work would become ‘more important’, and more gender neutral so a greater gender balance would be achieved.
This might go some way to addressing the huge economic inequality between men and women. It’s fatuous to simply blame biology, the fact that women have children for their lesser economic standing. The lower economic position of women is tied in part to the fact that we value ‘caring work’ less, and don’t pay for it.
However, as Marçal writes, bodies matter. “We can’t get away from the fact that at its core economics is based on the human body. Bodies that work, bodies that need care, bodies that create other bodies. Bodies that are born, age and die. Bodies that are sexed. Bodies that need help through many phases of life. And a society that can support them.”
Changing deeply embedded cultural norms is slow work. Instead of changing the wording in our Constitution, first, we might examine the structural problems in our society, workplaces, and economy.
For example, we don’t have properly paid paternity leave, it doesn’t form part of our cultural norms. Nor do we have properly funded, affordable, high-quality, state-run childcare. This forces families to make hard choices all the time because somebody has to mind small children and elderly relatives.
It often compels women to stay at home, or work part-time, thus lowering their value in the paid economy or if they want to work full time encouraging them to exploit another woman, often migrant women to perform the caring function. Because women have been assigned the task of caring for others, many don’t get to maximise their economic gain in the way that men do which leaves them vulnerable in myriads of ways, potentially pushing them into female poverty and economic insecurity.
Having lived a life and knowing the harsh economic realities of the invisible economy to which I, and so many others have made a substantial contribution, I’m unprepared to overlook the fact that the bulk of caring, cleaning, cooking, childcare, and caring for elderly relatives is still done by women.
With certain reservations, I’m afraid it will be a fat No from me in March.