Woman's Worth

The Article published in “The Times Of India”

 ( May 08 , 2006 ) is worth reading……….

Marriage is a big deal — for men, that is. Women partners — whether they stay at home or go to work in an office — end up doing most household chores.

Multitasking 24x7 is a way of life for them, as they juggle jobs like house-keeping, cooking, nursing, accounting, gardening, counsel-ling, tutoring, ministering, laundering, baby-sitting, driving, and now computing as well.

Salary.com, a website that tracks salaries for a variety of jobs, has come up with a "Mom Salary Wizard" that helps you calculate the real worth of your job as a "housewife". The average stay-at-home mother, the website concludes, is worth $134,000 a year.

Urban Indian women might be doing as much as their US counterparts. As for the rural woman, her lot is bearing the brunt of running a household and playing caregiver in a large family, often making do with scant resources.

Unsurprisingly, women from economically backward rural and urban families routinely practise austere self-denial in order to keep the home fire burning. With gender prejudices still rampant, a woman's worth is grossly underestimated and undervalued.

Women from the other end of the socio-economic spectrum too are often undervalued, albeit in ways different from their less fortunate sisters.

However, the computation offered by Salary.com does not factor in overtime — including which would hike the economic worth of a stay-at-home mother probably beyond that of a corporate executive.

Should the economic value of housework be included in the computation of a country's gross domestic product? Notional though it might be, it could be argued that doing so would reflect a country's productivity more accurately.

And boost women's self-esteem. More importantly, it is only because there is this invisible, almost unlimited — but unpaid — domestic labour input from stay-at-home mothers or women who do double shifts at work and home that a country's GDP is what it is.

For without this silent input, the GDP would fall by more than half. The computation of two sets of GDP figures — with and without the invisible component — would clearly establish gender budgeting as an integral aspect of the budget-making exercise.

Tags: Mom, Salary, Household, GDP, Mom's salary Wizard, Salary.com, website, economic value of household work, economic worth of a stay-at-home mother, pay, labour

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