I keep thinking women used to hold up a lot of economically invisible structures, and were lured into monetizing their contribution in the job markets...
I keep thinking women used to hold up a lot of economically invisible structures, and were lured into monetizing their contribution in the job markets. The job market needed women more than women neded the job market.
The bait was personal financial independence, but it was at the expense of unmeasured social capital. The market absorbed a huge quantity of labor that had previously existed outside formal economic accounting. Care work, food preparation, child supervision, elder care, therapy, tutoring, cleaning, emotional support, and social coordination increasingly became services to be bought, outsourced, or institutionalized. This made the economy look larger, because more human activity is now monetized. But some of that “growth” was not genuine civilizational surplus. It was the conversion of formerly embedded relationships into paid transactions.
We are now, possibly, at the point of realizing we have misjudged the value of unpaid work and it’s scope.
This point is skewed female, obviously, and not the complete picture, but still.