A 2011 analysis of data collected on British civil servants between 1997 and 2004 found that working more than fifty-five hours per week significantly increased women’s risk of developing depression and anxiety – but did not have a statistically significant impact on men.33 Even working forty-one to fifty-five hours seemed to increase the probability of mental health problems in women. This was in line with a 1999 Canadian study34 and a 2017 analysis35 of six years of data from the Household Income Labour Dynamics of Australia Survey, both of which found that women had to work far fewer paid hours than men before their mental health started to deteriorate.
But it’s not only about mental health. Swedish studies have found that moderate overtime work increases women’s hospitalisation and mortality rate, but has a protective effect for men.36 A 2016 US paper on the impact of long work hours over a thirty-two-year period found a similar gender disparity.37 Working moderately long hours (forty-one to fifty hours per week) was ‘associated with less risk of contracting heart disease, chronic lung disease, or depression’ in men. By contrast, such hours for female workers led to consistent and ‘alarming increases’ in life-threatening diseases, including heart disease and cancer. Women’s risk of developing these diseases started to rise when they worked more than forty hours per week. If they worked for an average of sixty hours per week for over thirty years, their risk of developing one of these diseases tripled.
So, what’s going on? Is this all proof that women are in fact the weaker sex?
Not exactly. In fact, the Australian study found that although the average man could work substantially longer hours than the average woman before his mental health was negatively impacted, there was one group of workers for whom the gender gap was much narrower. These workers are called the ‘unencumbered’, that is, workers with little to no care responsibilities. For the unencumbered, both men’s and women’s work-hour thresholds were much closer to the forty-eight hours stipulated by the ILO. The problem is, women aren’t unencumbered. It’s just that the work they do is invisible.
When Ryan Gosling thanked his partner Eva Mendes at the 2017 Golden Globes for her unpaid work, acknowledging that without it he would not be on stage accepting an award, he marked himself out as a rare man.38 Far more usual is the impressively unperceptive man Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman wrote about in 2018: ‘“I have kids and I work fulltime,” one boss crossly told a friend of mine who asked to have Fridays off. “Yes, and your wife quit her job to look after the kids,” my friend couldn’t quite bring herself to reply.’39
This man simply couldn’t see – or perhaps didn’t want to see – all the unpaid work that gets done around him. The unpaid work that enables him to have kids and easily work fulltime in paid employment. It doesn’t occur to him that the reason he doesn’t need Fridays off is not that he’s better than his female co-worker, but rather that, unlike him, she doesn’t have a fulltime wife at home.
Of course most male bosses in heterosexual relationships won’t have a fulltime wife at home, because most women can’t afford to quit work entirely. Instead, women accommodate their care responsibilities by going part-time. In the UK, 42% of women compared to 11% of men work part-time, and women make up 75% of part-time workers.40 And part-time work is paid less per hour than fulltime work – in part because it’s rare that a high-level post is offered as a job-share or with flexible working hours. Women end up working in jobs below their skill level that offer them the flexibility they need41 – but not the pay they deserve.42
In Scotland in 2016 the average hourly gender wage gap was 15% – but this average hid the substantial disparity between fulltime and part-time work.43 For those in fulltime work the hourly gap went down to 11%, but the hourly pay gap between men working fulltime and women working part-time was 32%. In 2017, median hourly pay for fulltime employees across the UK was ￡14 per hour,44 compared with ￡9.12 for part-time employees.45
Some call women’s segregation into low-paid work a choice. But it’s a funny kind of choice when there is no realistic option other than the children not being cared for and the housework not getting done. In any case, fifty year’s worth of US census data46 has proven that when women join an industry in high numbers, that industry attracts lower pay and loses ‘prestige’,47 suggesting that low-paid work chooses women rather than the other way around.
This choice-that-isn’t-a-choice is making women poor. A recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study found that the gender pay gap in hourly wages is substantially higher in countries where women spend a large amount of time on unpaid care compared to men.48 In the UK, women make up 61% of those earning below the living wage,49 and the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that the gender pay gap widens over the twelve years after a child is born to 33%, as women’s careers – and wages – stagnate.50 The US pay gap between mothers and married fathers is three times higher than the pay gap between men and women without children.51
Over time, these pay gaps add up. In Germany a woman who has given birth to one child can expect to earn up to $285,000 less by the time she’s forty-five than a woman who has worked fulltime without interruption.52 Data from France, Germany, Sweden and Turkey shows that even after accounting for social transfers that some countries employ to recognise the contribution women make through their unpaid care work, women earn between 31% and 75% less than men over their lifetimes.53
This all leaves women facing extreme poverty in their old age, in part because they simply can’t afford to save for it. But it’s also because when governments are designing pension schemes, they aren’t accounting for women’s lower lifetime earnings. This isn’t exactly a data gap, because the data does mostly exist. But collecting the data is useless unless governments use it. And they don’t.
Largely on the advice of international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the last two decades have seen an increasing global shift from social insurance to (often privately managed) individual capital account schemes.54 The payments a pensioner receives are directly based on their past contributions and the number of years during which the person is expected to collect benefits. This means women are penalised for the following: having to take time out for unpaid care work; early retirement (still a legal requirement in certain countries and professions); and for living longer.
Other policies simply benefit men more than women. These include Australia’s recent tax concessions for pension funds (men are likely to have a higher pension pot),55 and the UK’s recent shift to auto-enrolment. As with many pensions around the world, this policy makes the standard error of forgetting to compensate women for the time they have to take out of the paid labour force to attend to their unpaid care load. As a result, women ‘miss out on vital contributions to their pension’.56 More unforgivable is the British system’s failure to account for the fact that women are more likely to have several part-time jobs in order to combine their paid and unpaid workloads.57 In order to qualify for the auto-enrolment pension, a worker must earn at least ￡10,000 a year. But while many women do earn past this threshold, they earn it from multiple employers – and combined earnings are not counted towards the threshold. This means that ‘32% or 2.7 million employed women will not earn enough to benefit from auto-enrolment compared to 14% of employed men’.58
A counterpoint is provided by Brazil, Bolivia and Botswana, which have achieved close to universal pension coverage and smaller gender gaps ‘thanks to the introduction of widely available non-contributory pensions’.59 Women in Bolivia are credited with one year of pension contributions per child, up to a maximum of three children. As a side benefit (and a more long-term solution to the problem of feminised poverty), pension credits for the main carer have also been found to encourage men to take on more of the unpaid care load.60 Which raises the question: is women’s unpaid work under valued because we don’t see it – or is it invisible because we don’t value it?