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Defining Unpaid Work
Unpaid work can be separated into multiple categories: domestic work, care work, subsistence work, unpaid market labor and voluntary work. There is no clear consensus on the definitions of these categories; however, broadly, these types of work can be considered as contributing to the reproduction of society. Domestic work is an activity done in the maintenance of the home, which is usually universally recognizable, such as doing the laundry. Care work is work done by someone who is looking “after a relative or friend who needs support because of age, physical or learning disability, or illness, including mental illness” ; this work also includes the raising of children. Another aspect of the definition of care work “calls attention to activities that involve close personal or emotional interaction”. Also included in this category is “self-care,” in which leisure time and activities may be considered. Subsistence work is work done in order to meet base needs, such as collecting water, which do not have any market values assigned to them; although some of these activities “are categorized as productive activities according to the latest revision of the international System of National Accounts (SNA)…but are poorly measured by most surveys”. Unpaid market labor is understood as “the direct contributions of unpaid family members to market work that officially belongs to another member of the household”. Voluntary work is usually understood as work done outside of the home, but for little to no remuneration.

Common Methods of Measurement
Each country measures it’s own economic output. The most widespread method is the System of National Accounts (SNA), sponsored mainly by the United Nations (UN), but implemented by various other organizations, such as the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank. The SNA recognizes that unpaid work is an area of interest, however, “unpaid household services are excluded from [it’s] production boundary”. Feminist economists have criticized this system for this exclusion, as it is argued that by leaving out unpaid work, basic and necessary labor is uncounted. Even accounting measures intended to recognize gender disparities are criticized for ignoring this type of work. Two such examples are the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). It is argued that neither index indicates much about unpaid work. Despite these efforts to better measure gender inequalities, there is a call for a more comprehensive index, which includes participation in unpaid work. There has been increasing attention to this issue, such as the recognition of the issue within the SNA reports, and the “UN commitment to ‘measuring and valuing unpaid work’ with specific attention to women's family care giving – reproduction and household activities. This aim was reaffirmed at the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing”.

Proposed Methods of Measurement
The method most widely used is gathering information on time use, which has “been implemented by at least 20 developing countries and more are underway”. Information is collected on how much time men and women spend on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis on certain activities that fall under the categories of unpaid work. Techniques to gather this data include surveys, in-depth interviews , diaries , and participant observation. Proponents of time use diaries believe that this method “generate[s] more detailed information and tend[s] to capture greater variation than predetermined questions”. However, others argue that participant observation, “where the researcher spends lengthy periods of time in households helping out and observing the labor process”, generates more accurate information, as the researcher can ascertain whether or not those studied are accurately reporting what activities they perform.

Accurate Information
The first problem regarding the measurement of unpaid work is the issue of collecting accurate information. This is always a concern in research studies, however, because of the magnitude of this problem in this topic, it is of special concern. “Time-use surveys may reveal relatively little time devoted to unpaid direct care activities [because] the demands of subsistence production in those countries are great”, and may not take into account multitasking – for example, a mother may collect wood fuel while a child is in the same location, so the child is in her care (an indirect form of care work). It is usually argued that indirect care should be included, and it is in many time use studies, however, it may not be and as a result studies may undercount the amount of certain types of unpaid work. Surveys have also been criticized for lacking “depth and complexity” as questions cannot be specifically tailored. Participant observation has been criticized for being “so time- consuming that it can only focus on small numbers of households”, and so limited information is gathered.

A problem all types of data gathering run into is that the people who participate in these studies may not report accurately, for whatever reasons, perhaps the “people doing domestic labor have [had] no reason to pay close attention to the amount of time tasks take and they [may] often underestimate time spent in familiar activities”. Using time as a measure has also been criticized as it may show “the slowest and most inefficient workers…as carrying the greatest workload”. In addition, time use in assessing childcare is criticized as “easily obscur[ing] gender differences in workload. Men and women may both put in the same amount of time being responsible for children but as participant observation studies have shown, many men are more likely to ‘babysit’ their children while doing some- thing for themselves, such as watching TV. Their standards of care may be limited to ensuring the children are not hurt; dirty diapers may be ignored or deliberately left until the mother returns”. Another paradoxical aspect of this problem is that those most burdened may not be able to participate in the studies – “it is usually those women with the heaviest work loads who choose not to participate in these studies”. In general, a criticism to be made is the use of time as a general measure and by its use “some of the most demanding aspects of unpaid work [are unexplored] and the premise that time is an appropriate tool for measuring women's unpaid work goes unchallenged”.

Comparability
A second problem noted concerning this topic is the unease of comparability across societies. “Comparisons across countries are currently hampered by differences in activity classification and nomenclature”. In-depth surveys may be the only way to get the depth of information desired, but make it difficult to make cross-cultural comparisons. A more specific aspect of this problem is the lack of adequate universal terminology in discussing unpaid work. “Despite increasing recognition that domestic labor is work, existing vocabularies do not easily convey the new appreciations. People still tend to talk about work and home as if they were separate spheres. ‘Working mothers’ are usually assumed to be in the paid labor force, despite feminist assertions that "every mother is a working mother." There are no readily accepted terms to express different work activities or job titles. Housewife, home manager, homemaker are all problematic and none of them conveys the sense of a women who juggles both domestic labor and paid employment”.

Complexity
A third problem is the complexity of domestic labor and the issues of separating unpaid work categories. Time use studies are now taking into account multitasking issues, where activities are separated into primary and secondary activities, however, not all studies do this and even those that do may not take into account “the fact that frequently several tasks are done simultaneously, that tasks overlap, and that the boundaries between work and relationships are often unclear. How does a woman determine her primary activity when she is preparing dinner while putting the laundry away, making coffee for her spouse, having coffee and chatting with him, and attending to the children”. Some activities may not even be considered work, such as playing with a child (this has been categorized as developmental care work), and so may not be included in the responses to a study. As mentioned before, supervision (indirect care work) may not be “construe[d] as an activity at all”, which “suggests that activity-based surveys should be supplemented by more stylized questions regarding care responsibilities” as these activities may be undercounted. In the past, time use studies tended to measure only primary activities, and “respondents doing two or more things at once were asked to indicate which was the more important”, although this is changing in more recent years.

Valuation
Feminist economists argue for three main ways of valuating unpaid work: opportunity cost method, replacement cost method, and input-output cost method. Opportunity cost method “uses the wage a person would earn in the market” to see how much value their labor-time has. This method extrapolates from the opportunity cost theory in mainstream economics.

The second method of valuation uses replacement costs. In simple terms, this is done by measuring the amount of money a third-party would make for doing the same work if it was part of the market. In other words, the value of a person cleaning the house in an hour is the same as the hourly wage for a maid. Within this method there are two approaches: the first is a generalist replacement cost method, which examines if “it would be possible, for example, to take the wage of a general domestic worker who could perform a variety of tasks including childcare”. The second approach is the specialist replacement cost method, which aims to “distinguish between the different household tasks and choose replacements accordingly”.

The third method is input-output cost method. This looks at both the costs of inputs and includes any value added by the household. “For instance, the value of time devoted to cooking a meal can be determined by asking what it could cost to purchase a similar meal (or output) in the market, then subtracting the cost of the capital goods, utilities and raw materials devoted to that meal. This remainder represents the value of the other factors of production, primarily labor”. These types of models try to value household output by determining monetary values for the inputs (in the dinner example: for the ingredients and production of the meal) and compare these with formal market equivalents.

Monetary Levels
These methods, too, have been criticized. At the basic level, one criticism is on how monetary levels are chosen. A question which needs to be addressed is how unpaid work should be valued when more than one activity is being performed or more than one output produced? Another issue is differences in quality between market products and household products. Some feminist economists take issue with using the market system to determine values. Reasons for this objection include: it may lead to the conclusion that “the market provides perfect substitutes for non-market work” ; the wage produced in the market for services may not accurately reflect “the actual opportunity cost of time spent in household production” ; and the wages used in valuation methods come from industries where wages are already depressed because of gender inequalities, and so will not accurately value unpaid work. A related argument is that the market “accepts existing sex/gender divisions of labor and pay inequalities as normal and unproblematic. With this basic assumption underlying their calculations, the valuations produced serve to reinforce sex/gender inequalities rather than challenge women's subordination”.

Opportunity Cost
Criticisms are also leveled against the separate methods of valuation. Opportunity cost method “depends on the lost earnings of the worker so that a toilet cleaned by a lawyer has much greater value than one cleaned by a janitor”, which means that the value varies too drastically. There are also issues with the uniformity of this method not just across multiple individuals, but also for a single person: it “may not be uniform across the entire day or across days of the week”. There is also the issue of whether any enjoyment of the activity should be deducted from the opportunity cost estimate.

Replacement Cost
Replacement cost method also has critiques, such as what types of jobs should be used as substitutes. For example, should childcare activities “be calculated using the wages of daycare workers or child psychiatrists?”. This also relates to the issue of depressed wages in female-dominated industries, and whether using these jobs as an equivalent leads to the undervaluing of unpaid work. Some have argued that education levels should be comparable, for example, “the value of time that a college- educated parent spends reading aloud to a child should be ascertained by asking how much it would cost to hire a college-educated worker to do the same, not by an average housekeeper’s wage”.

Input-Output Methods
Critiques against the input-output methods include: the difficulty of identifying and measuring household outputs and the issues of variation of households and these effects.