McKinsey has estimated the value of the work women do at home at $10 trillion, about the size of China’s GDP. Currently home-making work done by women is not counted in GDP – unless the work is done by a paid housekeeper. If you are a believer in “what gets measured gets managed” then if work in the home gets measured, it can be managed and redistributed more efficiently. Some of the time saved would be used for education and more skilled work. This could add a huge improvement in living standards boost the global economy. According to a scenario in the McKinsey report:
“We consider a “full potential” scenario in which women participate in the economy identically to men and find that it would add up to $28 trillion, or 26 percent, to annual global GDP by 2025 compared with a business-as-usual scenario. This impact is roughly equivalent to the size of the combined Chinese and US economies today. We also analyzed an alternative “best in region” scenario in which all countries match the progress toward gender parity of the fastest-improving country in their region. This would add as much as $12 trillion in annual 2025 GDP, equivalent in size to the current GDP of Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom combined, or twice the likely growth in global GDP contributed by female workers between 2014 and 2025 in a business-as-usual scenario.”
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