Imagine you're about to start your weekend. Your to-do list for the day is considerable, to say the least. You need to finish tasks left over from the workweek, prepare for some of the upcoming week's activities and squeeze in some you time to read and exercise.

However, instead of immediately checking off that list, you decide to take care of a few little household chores first: you shovel snow outside, cook a meal for your partner, do a little cleaning and then talk on the phone with a friend in need of emotional support.

Before you know it, it's Saturday night, and you remorsefully ask yourself where the time went. "I wasn't productive at all; all that work is still undone," you say. "What did I even spend the whole day doing?"

According to the latest report by Praxis, you just contributed a full workday's worth of unpaid care work to the Estonian economy.

Simply put, unpaid care work is part of the productive economy that goes uncompensated and, as a result, is excluded from national GDP calculations — but nonetheless remains essential to keeping society running.  

Praxis analyst Isabel Jezierska spoke to ERR's Novaator about how to calculate the total value of unpaid care work, and what its gender distribution reveals about Estonia.

What is unpaid care work?

Broadly speaking, unpaid care work can be defined in two ways: either by providing a single comprehensive definition, or by listing the activities that fall under this category. Examples of unpaid care work include cleaning, child-rearing, dishes, cooking, caring for adult parents, household repairs, mowing the lawn as well as providing others with emotional support.

To define it more precisely — making it possible to clarify what qualifies as unpaid care work and what doesn't — Jezierska suggests starting with the concept of productive labor.

While this is usually understood as work that contributes to the economy and is paid for, a more useful definition considers it work that can be delegated to someone else. What is crucial is distinguishing this from both leisure time and consumption.

"For instance, I can hire a cleaner to clean my home," Jezierska explained. "It doesn't matter whether I do it myself or someone else does. If I had enough money, I could outsource this task. But I can't delegate eating or resting to someone else. Thus, those [activities] are not considered productive work that contributes to the economy."

The next step is to differentiate care work from paid labor. While both are types of productive work, unpaid care work refers to labor that is performed without wages, but still contributes to the economy. Thus, a person's daily time is divided between leisure, paid work and unpaid care work.

Why calculate it?

Although calculating the total volume of unpaid care work isn't common practice today, it isn't a new concept either. In fact, Norway was still including unpaid care work in its GDP calculations in the first half of the 20th century, only abandoning the practice in the 1940s due to the international standardization of productivity metrics.

According to the think tank analyst, calculating the total volume of unpaid care work is necessary for two main reasons.

First, it provides a better understanding of how a society functions within a market economy.

"If we want to understand what's happening in society and the economy, we can't ignore activities that people spend at least half of their non-leisure, non-paid-work time on," she pointed out. "Moreover, keeping society and the economy going, as well as people's well-being, depend directly on unpaid care work."

The second reason is gender-related. According to Jezierska, examining the volume of unpaid care work makes it possible to highlight the gender gap in care responsibilities — that is, the fact that women bear a significantly greater burden of unpaid care work than men.

"For example, we know that women in Estonia bear a higher care work load than men, while also working many more paid hours than women in many other European countries," she pointed out. "Against this backdrop, we can more precisely ask what impact this gap has on different types of productive work."

How is it calculated?

Just as GDP can be calculated using different approaches, unpaid care work can also be measured in various ways. Broadly speaking, there are two main methodological approaches for doing so: input-based and output-based. For their study, Praxis analysts used data from Statistics Estonia's time-use survey.

Input-based methods are relatively straightforward. Essentially, a monetary value is assigned to the time spent on unpaid care work. This could be the minimum wage, the average gross wage or the amount a person would earn if they spent that time doing their regular paid job instead.

"The latter approach, of course, presents certain problems," Jezierska acknowledged. "For example, the time of a painter painting their own wall at home is valued at less than a lawyer painting their own wall. Clearly, the painter does a better job, yet the lawyer's time is somehow considered more valuable. This is why it's usually preferred to substitute in the wages of a housekeeper theoretically capable of performing all these tasks."

Using the minimum wage as a baseline, the total value of unpaid care work in Estonia was calculated at €4.6 billion annually. Using the average gross wage, that figure rose to €11.5 billion. The replacement cost method, using the wage rates of specialists — such as a cleaner's wages for cleaning tasks and assistant chef's wages for cooking — resulted in a total of €6.1 billion.

Estimating based on the opportunity cost of time — based on what a person would earn doing their paid job instead — the total value of unpaid care work ranged between €8.8 billion and €12 billion annually.

Unlike input-based approaches, output-based methods focus on the results of the work rather than the time spent.

"For example, each household produces a certain number of meals per year," the analyst explained. "We can assess the value of these meals and subtract the costs of labor, capital and raw materials. If a family makes sandwiches using bread, cucumbers, tomatoes, butter and cheese, then they've created something with greater value than its individual components."

Under the output-based method, while Praxis analysts did calculate how much an imaginary household might contribute to the economy, their primary goal was to illustrate what such a calculation might look like. According to Jezierska, this approach did not allow for the total volume of unpaid care work to be determined; doing so would require conducting separate data collection, which was not done as part of this study.

When examining care work volumes within a binary gender division, the gap is predictably significant. Women perform an average of 201 minutes of unpaid care work a day, while men do an average of 137 minutes. This means that, in annual terms, the total volume of unpaid care work performed by women is approximately 1.6 times that of men, as calculated using input-based methods.

Using a simplified replacement wage — set at the national minimum wage — men contribute €1.7 billion in unpaid care work annually, while women contribute €2.9 billion. In relation to Estonia's GDP, this amounts to 4 and 8 percent, respectively.

Calculating based on the average gross wage, women contribute €7.2 billion, while men contribute €4.3 billion. Applying a specialist's wages using the replacement wage method, men's annual contributions stand at €2.3 billion in unpaid care work, while women's reach €3.8 billion. Under the potential alternative time-use method, men in Estonia perform unpaid care work valued at €3.5 billion annually, while women perform €5.4 billion worth.

What can be done with this data?

"Based on our work, the state could start considering whether and how to revise the current GDP framework," suggested Praxis analyst Isabel Jezierska. "Whether that means incorporating unpaid care work into GDP calculations or presenting a separate Gross Care Product (GCP) alongside GDP."

Currently, economic assessments are based on whether people have become more productive, whether productivity has increased or whether the economy is growing. Including GCP, thus, would provide a more comprehensive picture of what is happening. For example, it would allow for analysis of whether economic growth comes at the expense of something else, or whether men and women perform more or less unpaid care work during economic fluctuations.

At the same time, the think tank's calculations show that unpaid care work is distributed very unevenly in Estonia. In addition to gender disparities, there are certain groups for whom the burden of care work is disproportionately high — such as those who care for disabled people or elderly relatives. Insights like these could help society distribute this burden more equitably.

"At the same time, I want to emphasize that the goal certainly isn't for us to do less unpaid care work," Jezierska explained. "It's essential to keeping society going in the first place. It's necessary to keep the economy going, for allowing people to socialize, and for them to be able to engage in paid employment. Care work forms the foundation of social cohesion; it's needed to keep democratic institutions going, which in turn are necessary to keep the paid economy going. Our report brings this reality to light."

A third key point is that calculating the volume and distribution of unpaid care work serves as a political tool for those who want to take action on this issue. Since, as Jezierska believes, society still tends to value what can be assigned a price tag, discussing concrete numerical values allows for more effective public discourse on the topic.

To gain an even clearer overview of unpaid care work, Praxis analysts suggest that such calculations should be conducted more frequently. As Statistics Estonia collects time-use data only once every ten years, these estimates can currently only be calculated once a decade.

Finally, Jezierska shared an illustrative anecdote. Imagine a man who has a housekeeper, whom he marries after a few years of a professional relationship. This woman had previously been paid for her domestic labor, but after marriage, she no longer is. Now the GDP goes down. Now, imagine the man also cares for his mother at home. At some point, he decides to send her to a care home, where someone else will care for her. Now the GDP goes up.

"This is a totally absurd situation!" she pointed out. "For some reason, one type of work is counted in the GDP, while another isn't. These kinds of absurdities illustrate just how arbitrary it is to decide what we include in GDP calculations and what we don't. It's time to expand our approach."

Read the full Praxis study "The invisible part of the economy: What is the price of unpaid care work?" here (link in Estonian).

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