Project to value unpaid work

Press, 1 February 1988, Page 14

Project to value unpaid work

The unpaid work done by New Zealand women may be the subject of a pilot project to measure its value, the Minister of Women’s Affairs, Mrs Shields, has announced. Mrs Shields hopes to work on a research proposal for the pilot project over the next couple of years, she told N.Z.P.A.

The International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) and both the United Nations Statistical Commission and the Status of Women Commission, will provide support and technical assistance for the project. In developing countries

many women work in the “informal” economy — in subsistence agriculture, for example. In New Zealand, women in the rural sector have been working for years as unpaid assistants. In the home, women do unpaid work such as child care or nursing elderly or handicapped relatives.

“Those jobs most decidedly are important jobs, are jobs which other people get paid for and which should at least have an imputed value,” she says. . “The upshot of women’s work not being valued of course is that when you ask many women what they do, they say ‘I do not do anything,

I am just a housewife’.” Mrs Shields says she is not suggesting at this point that women should be paid for working in the home, but that their work should be given a value, both for the women’s selfesteem and for their prospects if they chose to return to paid employ-

ment. “They are not doing nothing, they are contributing to the good of the community. But when they decide to return to work, they are counted as having done nothing because nobody has ever put a value on what they were about,” she maintains.