The 1960s and 70s saw the emergence of numerous theoretical challenges to the binary
concept of contributions to social wealth according to which, as social role theory
(Daune-Richard, 2005) clearly illustrates, men contribute to economic and social life by
taking part in paid production and women by taking responsibility for household and
care work. Even today, the debate continues between those who recognise the ‘value’ to
society of unpaid activities and seek to improve the distribution of all activities (paid
and unpaid) between the sexes (Fraser, 1994), possibly by imputing a monetary value to
household work (Folbre, Wagman, 1993), and those who believe that the priority is to
ensure equal access to paid work for men and women (Beneria, 1999).
In any event, all attempts to measure changes in these contributions rely on tools
invented in the mid-20th century, and in particular on the key reference indicator used to
measure social performance, namely gross domestic product (GDP). However, National
Income and Products Accounts (NIPA), which are representation and valuation systems
mainly devised by men, have from the outset been biased in favour of activities carried
out by men; a nation’s wealth is defined in such a way as to include only those activities
resulting in the production of goods and services intended, if not solely for market
exchange, then at least for exchange in a market.
Based on numerous, usually unexplained conventions, NIPAs ignore all other activities
and disregard the contribution of activities undertaken within households, which are
usually carried out by women, and indeed regard them as having zero value (Folbre,
Wagman, 1993). This article revisits the reasons for this exclusion and to outline various
ways of overcoming these limitations, as well as pointing out the advantages and
disadvantages of each one.
We begin by summarising the basic premises that underlay the development of ‘wealth
conventions’ (Gadrey, 2003) during the 20th century, and particularly the justifications
advanced for them (section 1). The second section is given over to an examination of the
advantages and disadvantages of one of the main proposals put forward by researchers
and some schools of feminist thought for overcoming the perceived shortcomings of
national account systems, namely the economic estimation of the value of activities
carried on within households and its possible incorporation into an expanded GDP. The
Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (the socalled Stiglitz Commission, 2009) recently attracted a great deal of media coverage by
putting forward a proposal of this kind (section 2). Taking note of the risks associated
with such an approach, and more generally with proposals that rely exclusively or
preferentially on monetisation, we build on earlier studies (co-author ; author ; Fair,
2011) in order to suggest another path. In conjunction with the production of a satellite
account of household work, demands for which were first made over 30 years ago1, this
alternative approach involves developing indicators of wealth that would complement
and act as alternatives to GDP and reflect as accurately as possible the inequalities that
exist in men’s and women’s access to income, goods, rights, activities and property and,
more generally, to all material and immaterial resources (section 3).
1
See Landefeld and McCulla (2005) for an experiment of such satellite accounts.
1
I)
GDP: an indicator of wealth that excludes the activities undertaken by
women
It was in 1934 that Simon Kuznets, nowadays regarded as the inventor of GDP,
published National Income 1929-1932, in which he sought to compare nations’ growth
and productivity and to understand the distribution of income and its impact on wellbeing and consumption. This was the first attempt to estimate the national income of the
USA. Among the questions addressed at the very beginning of the volume and in the
chapter entitled ‘Services of housewives and other members of the family’, Kuznets
justifies the exclusion of household activities from GDP by pointing to the difficulty of
estimating their value: “The volume of services rendered by housewives and other
members of the household toward the satisfaction of wants must be imposing indeed,
when totalled for 30 million families comprising the population of this country; and the
item is thus large enough to affect materially any estimate of national income. But the
organization of these services render them an integral part of family life at large, rather
than of the specifically business life of the nation (…) It was considered best to omit this
large group of services from national income, especially since no reliable basis is available
for estimating their value.’(Kuznets, op.cit., p. 4) This initial decision marked the
beginning of a lengthy period during which all activities carried on within households,
including those considered as ‘productive’, were excluded from GDP. While the System
of National Accounts developed under the aegis of the United Nations in 1968, which
gradually set out the principles of national account systems, maintained a ‘stony silence’
(Hill, 1977) on the status of these activities, the 1993 version explicitly excluded them
and justified that exclusion2. The reasons given then were the same as those that were to
be advanced 15 years later, even in the Stiglitz Commission’s report (op. cit.).
1) The 1968 System of National Accounts: an innocent oversight?
To guide us on our path through the System of National Accounts of 1968, we draw on
the commented reading by Peter Hill in a 1977 article given over to ‘own account’
production and entitled ‘Do-it-yourself and GDP’, which reveals the convention-based
nature of this first national account system, the coherence of which can legitimately be
questioned. Hill suggests, firstly, that activities related to the production of goods and
services (‘productive activities’) be distinguished from non-productive activities.
Establishing a definition that was to become standard, he notes that a good or a service
is characterised by the fact that it can be the object of an exchange: the main criterion for
defining whether or not an activity is productive is its exchange potential, or
delegatibility3. This is why leisure and care activities are excluded. They are not goods or
services. They do not constitute production. But, Hill continues, what about goods
2
Until 1968, national account systems were developed at national level, even though in most Western countries
the broad outlines were based on mutual exchanges of experience. France was the first to adopt, in their entirety,
the recommendations of the System of National Accounts drawn up by the United Nations in 1968 and by the
European System of Integrated Economic Accounts in 1970 (Vanoli, 2002, p. 139). To the best of our
knowledge, there was never any real debate about the treatment of domestic activities.
3
Whether activities are delegatable or not is determined by variable social norms, as Delphine Roy very
pertinently points out (2011, p. 13).
2
produced ‘on one’s own account’? According to the System of National Accounts (SNA),
answers Hill, they can be included in GDP, since they could be the object of an exchange.
What of ‘own account services’ provided within households? Are they also part of GDP,
like goods? The Systems of National Accounts, says Hill, maintains a “stony silence” on
this category of activities and their status: no principle for dealing with them is laid
down except for the tacit instruction to ignore them. And yet, if the criterion of exchange
potential is accepted, it seems perfectly obvious that much of what is done in households
– cleaning, washing, ironing, shopping, cooking, childcare etc. – could constitute a
service capable of being exchanged. In other words, if the criterion for declaring an
activity to be ‘productive’ and that it must therefore be classified as ‘production’ is not
the purpose of the exchange but the possibility of exchange, why would a good produced
on one’s own account be regarded as production and therefore worthy of inclusion in
GDP and not ‘own account’ services?
Hill attempts to justify the tacit convention adopted by the 1968 SNA in the course of a
few surprising paragraphs. He begins by recalling the joke told by specialists in national
accounting (when a man marries his maid, GDP goes down) before attempting to show
that this convention in no way seeks to dismiss housewives and what they do as
negligible but simply to disregard certain activities which, almost accidentally one might
say, are carried out mainly by women: ‘However, there is in fact no convention about
housewives. The convention is that certain kinds of activities which are typically
performed by housewives are not included as production on own account even though
they do produce genuine services’ (page 34)4. The proof: when housewives engage in
activities on their own account that are conventionally included in GDP (e.g. producing
vegetables in a kitchen garden), then their production is taken into account. This clearly
proves, writes Hill, that there is no discrimination against housewives as such but rather
against the type of activity they engage in: “When the housewife engages in the kind of
own account production which it is conventional to include in GDP, such as growing
vegetables or replacing the car's engine, her output is, of course, counted. This again
illustrates that there is no discrimination against the housewife as such but against the
kind of do it yourself activities typically performed by housewives” (op. cit. p.35).
However, this question of own account production merely serves to reveal the
inconsistency of this argument. On the one hand, goods produced for one’s own
consumption and in no way intended for exchange are counted as production and
incorporated into GDP; on the other hand, activities carried out within the home by
women, who produce services capable of being the object of an exchange and being
provided by another economic unit, are not included in GDP (Delphy, 1970; Gadrey,
Jany-Catrice, 2006).
This is a form of production that is not to be included in GDP. Far from being surprised
or upset by this, T.P. Hill attempts to justify this inconsistency and this omission with
some very unconvincing quibbling. However, what is even more interesting is that the
4
Authors’ emphasis.
3
SNA remains silent on this question. There are two possible reasons for this. Either the
question was considered too complex and could therefore not been taken into account
or it appeared so normal not to include activities carried out by women that the SNA did
not even mention the possibility that they could be.
2) The revised System of National Accounts of 1993: justifying exclusion
Things become clearer with the revised System of National Accounts of 1993. The
definition of production (called the ‘production boundary’) now encompasses all the
goods produced by households for their own consumption but excludes all services, with
the exception of housing services, which homeowners provide for themselves and for
which a rent is imputed, and storage. Although the first attempt to estimate the value of
domestic work in France dates from 1981 (Chadeau, Fouquet, 1981), Ann Chadeau
recalls, in a summarising article published in 1992, the main reasons adduced by
national accounts specialists for refusing to impute a value to service production. She
cites, successively, these activities’ relative independence and isolation from markets,
the extreme difficulty of making an economically significant estimate of their values and
the negative effects this could have on the usefulness of national accounts in guiding
economic policy and for analysis of markets and their disequilibria.
Chadeau then examines each of these explanations and refutes them one by one. Are the
housing services that homeowners provide for themselves not fundamentally different
from the other services produced for self-consumption? In order to establish the price of
the services produced, it would be sufficient to base any estimates on market prices,
when an equivalent exists. Statistics on this production are available, even though
efforts might be needed to consolidate them. The production of own account services is
described as a ‘totally autonomous activity with limited repercussions on the rest of the
economy’; however, Ann Chadeau argues, there are many interactions between what is
produced in the market and what is produced in the home. Finally, the unreliability of
measures of the value of services produced in the home cannot be sufficient reason to
ignore them altogether.
Nevertheless, Chadeau (and many others, such as André Vanoli, 2004) acknowledges
that ‘the very scale of the imputation that would be necessary if all household
production were taken into account constitutes a major argument against its inclusion in
unamended form in the aggregates of national accounts’. A more qualified approach
might involve presenting estimations of household production in the form of
memorandum items alongside the SNA’s standard statistics, on the one hand, and
establishing a household satellite account, on the other. This latter proposal had already
been put forward in 1977 by a UN commission5.
3) Persistent exclusion
‘Satellite Accounts to Supplement National Accounts and Balance Sheets as a Means of Measuring Well-being:
Technical report’ of 1977, Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, 1977.
5
4
The conventions on which SNAs are based reveal a double preference: for activities that
necessarily involve exchange and hence socialisation (which may be an instinctive
anthropological choice in favour of that which encourages individuals to establish closer
ties with each other in order to overcome their ‘unsocial sociability’, that is their
difficulty in living together that Kant emphasises (Méda, 1995 ; 1999)) and for activities
to which a price can be allocated. Since the activities intended for exchange in return for
payment are still largely carried out by men and those not intended for exchange and
which remain unpaid are largely carried out by women, these two preferences combine
to leave unacknowledged and excluded activities that are largely women’s province.
These choices are also revealing of what was considered important or strategic at a
particular time. As François Fourquet showed in Les comptes de la puissance (1981),
SNAs implicitly reveal their designers’ main decisions as to what counts: that being the
case, defining what is productive is simply a way of denoting what counts most in a
society at any given moment. What is productive? ‘That which creates the wealth and
power of a nation at war is what is productive. A nation’s economy is that store, that
immense reserve of strength that lies behind the military spearhead, that supports the
furthermost point of power but forms the real underlying core of that power. The
economy is the material support required by a state at war’ (Fourquet, op. cit. p. 151). It
is true that women, by taking responsibility for the reproduction of a country’s military
strength, have very strong links with what is productive, but those links are too indirect,
too oblique, too distant. Household activity is in fact as far removed as it is possible to be
from what was important at the time when national accounts were being developed:
power and the reconstruction of a manufacturing, commercial and competitive base
(Gadrey, Jany-Catrice, 2006).
A further three technical arguments were to receive particular attention in the debates.
The first concerned the allegedly low level of labour productivity in services. This
approach to labour in service industries, which was strongly emphasised by classical
economists such as Smith and Marx (Gadrey, Delaunay, 1987), is still implicitly present
in collective representations and affects recognition of the labour of those – mainly
women – who provide these services. Thus the president of General Motors declared in
1985 : ‘Wealth is produced when a car is produced, unlike what happens when you sell
an insurance policy or a hamburger’. In 2004, in a French Senate debate, the President of
Axa (one of the major Insurance company) for his part declared that: ‘personal services
are, by their very nature, not wealth creating. Insurance, yes, but personal services, no’.
The second argument, as we have seen, is based on the idea that services, particularly
those produced in the domestic sphere, would be potentially less exchangeable than
goods (Vanoli, 2004), which would explain the unequal treatment given to households’
self-production, on the one hand, and the service activities carried out in households, on
the other. The third argument is based on a ‘reality’ principle: if household production
were to be added to the production accounts and thence incorporated into GDP, the
estimated volume of production would be very significantly increased. This in turn
would undermine the accounting system because of the difficulty of attributing a
monetary value to this non-market, non-monetary activity. ‘National accountants are
agreed on the principle of saying that [household activities] count as production but
5
there are two or three methods with considerable variations depending on the
assumptions made, which means that if they were incorporated into the quarterly or
annual accounts, it would undermine the value of the indicators as reflectors of shortterm economic trends’ (interview with Vanoli6, 29/01/2002).
Although it offers a quantified estimate of living standards following the incorporation
of domestic work and leisure into GDP, the Stiglitz Commission’s report nevertheless
exactly repeats the standard arguments deployed by national accountants against the
inclusion of household production. On the one hand, household production is too
‘extensive’ to be incorporated into GDP, since regardless of the methods used to
calculate it household production is estimated to lie within a range running from one
third to three quarters of GDP. ‘It is undesirable to have assumption-driven data so
massively influencing overall aggregates’ (Stiglitz Commission, 2009, p. 25). We are
dealing here not with conceptual considerations but rather with political – or pragmatic
– choices. As things stand, its inclusion would run the risk of ‘altering our assessment of
the pace of economic growth’ (op.cit. p. 139). On the other hand, it is argued that this
production is regarded as non-essential; like others before it, the Stiglitz Commission
argues in favour of the incorporation of domestic production not into the ‘core accounts’
(sic) but into ‘satellite accounts’.
II) Beyond GDP: estimating the value of household production and incorporating
it into GDP
As soon as GDP was ‘invented’, Kuznets himself was dissatisfied. In his view, after all, the
ultimate objectives of economic activity were to satisfy the needs of individual
consumers. Thus in order to obtain an accurate idea of their well-being, the definition of
national income would have to be stripped of everything not reflected in a flow of goods
and services towards individual consumers. In general terms, the inflated costs of urban
civilisation, put at 20 to 30% of consumer expenditure, would have to be stripped out.
Conversely, certain non-market activities could be said to contribute to well-being, such
as housewives’ services, for example. This was a way of satisfying certain needs with
limited means and would therefore have to be ‘estimated’. This constituted an initial
attempt to take into consideration what women do. As we have already seen, Kuznets
did not incorporate these non-market activities into his National Income of 1934 but he
did note that ‘if the services provided by housewives had been imputed on the basis of
the average remuneration of household services, the product of these services would
have represented approximately one quarter of national income in 1929’. Several
estimates of domestic work were subsequently carried out in several countries; the
results differed depending on the method used but such work always represented a very
high percentage of GDP.
1) Estimates of household production
6
Interview conducted as part of the preparatory and exploratory phase of what was to become the report and
then book (Gadrey, Jany-Catrice, 2006).
6
As early as 1934, Margaret Reid, in Economics of household production, had criticised the
fact that household production was not included in national income accounts and
developed a method for estimating the value of household work. The first estimates of
household production were carried out in the 1930s in Hungary, Italy and Sweden.
These studies showed that housewives’ imputed income accounted at that time for
between 10 and 30% of national income. In 1972, in Is Growth obsolete?, Nordhaus and
Tobin estimated the value of non-market activities (productive household activities and
leisure) and obtained a figure for 1965 of between 42 and 48% of GDP at constant 1958
prices. Other estimates produced a figure of 41% for household activities alone in 1969.
In a 1976 study, Oli Hawrylyshyn compared eight methods of estimating household
production in the USA and showed that the value of household activities increased GDP
by 30 to 40%. With their own measurement conventions, Landesfeld and McCulla obtain
figures for the United States showing that “the inclusion of household nonmarket
services raises GDP by 43 percent in 1946 and by 24 percent in 1997” (op. cit. p. 300).
while in 1981, Chadeau and Fouquet obtained figures ranging from 32 to 77% of French
GDP (Chadeau, Fouquet, 1981)7. More recently, the French national statistic institute
produce for the first time national figures for this household production and estimates
that it represents one third of total GDP, and precise that the two third are realized by
women.
These studies confirm that ‘to disregard the income and wealth generated by household
work is to introduce distortion into various areas of economic analysis’ (Chadeau, 1992).
After all, she notes, national income is underestimated, final consumption, as normally
measured, gives a false idea of actual consumption and the rates of growth observed are
overestimated. Women’s economic contribution to production is significantly
underestimated by the standard statistics, since even in the 21st century women still
carry out about two thirds of all household tasks. Moreover, the production of nonmarket services by household members increases economic well-being.
In order to estimate the value of household activities, choices have to be made as to the
activities to be included, and accurate data on the time each family member devotes to
the various activities (time budget surveys) or on the products produced by each
activity has to be obtained; finally, a method has to be found for determining the value to
be attributed to these activities, i.e. selecting the kind of worker whose wage will serve
as a comparator. The methods used to impute a value to non-market production can be
divided into two broad categories: the output-based approach and the input-based
approach (Chadeau, 1992). The first involves imputing a direct monetary value to
household production, which requires a number of variables to be considered: capital
input, labour input, intermediate consumption, investment and output (Roy, 2011). The
second involves imputing a monetary value to household work. This is the method most
commonly used by experts, often for statistical convenience. It requires accurate time
budget surveys and use of one of the two available methods of estimating the value of
domestic work. In the first, domestic work is compared to what it would cost to have it
done by a third party, either a domestic employee (general substitute) or specialists
(specialised substitute). In the second, household work is valued on the basis of the
wage the person doing it could earn in the labour market if she were employed
(estimate based on the ‘potential gain’ or opportunity cost).
7
They provide estimates calculated by three main methods and including or excluding social security
contributions, i.e. six estimates in all.
7
All these methods obviously have their own drawbacks. The output-based approach is
the most satisfactory because it makes it possible to evaluate the goods and services
produced in households at the prices at which they could be procured in the market.
However, there is a lack of data, particularly on the output of households. The
opportunity cost method has little to recommend it, since it imputes different values to
the same services depending on the person producing them. The more highly qualified
that person is8 or the more he or she can lay claim to a high salary, the greater the value
of the domestic work is. According to this accounting convention, domestic work done
by men is, at a stroke, worth more than that done by women. The general substitute
model produces the lowest values. It is based on the unverified hypothesis that domestic
work requires few skills and takes the lowest wage in the labour market as its reference
point. In all cases, it is women’s wages that have to be used, which means that the effects
of gender relations (wage discrimination and women’s occupational segregation) are
brought to bear on estimates of household production, which are consequently
undervalued (Chadeau, 1992; Beneria, 1999).
Chadeau notes that the inclusion of domestic work in GDP could lead to the adoption of
different economic and social policies. In most accounting conventions, after all, the
inclusion of domestic work reduces the rate of GDP growth. It might be wondered
whether this is not in fact one of the main reasons for its exclusion.
2) The contributions of the Stiglitz Commission
The Stiglitz Report (2009) does not propose any major innovations with respect to
household production. In fact, in its various contributions, the Commission9 made a
drastic choice of methods for estimating household production, causing it to adopt the
lowest estimate. True, domestic work is defined as consisting of ‘unpaid activities that
produce goods and services for people inside or outside the household10’, which implies
that it includes charitable or voluntary activities within its scope. However, the valuation
method adopted is based on inputs derived from time budget surveys, to which an
hourly wage (pre-tax) of a ‘generalist housewife’ (sic) is imputed. Moreover, only the
time given over to the main activity is taken into account, which deliberately ignores the
‘multi-tasking’ that women in the domestic sphere frequently have to engage in. These
choices serve to reinforce the highly debatable assumptions frequently made about the
supposedly weak or non-existent productivity in this area of activity.
According to the Commission, its choices were determined by the need for ‘simplicity’
(thus direct measures of output were not adopted because they are empirically
complicated11, while others were adopted ‘for the purpose in hand’)12. And yet it was
8
The wage of inactive individuals is calculated on the basis of their level of education.
Report and ‘Annex A’ of the report; the latter has never really been widely circulated.
10
“To account for labor input into non-market household production we measure the number of hours
households spend in unpaid activities that produce goods or services for people inside or outside the
Household” (Annex A).
11 ‘challenging empirically’
12 Thus it is stated, for example, that: “for the purpose at hand, we use a housekeeper wage rate”.
9
8
one of the Stiglitz Commission’s aims to provide information about methods, to debate
them and to innovate. On the question of women’s contribution to national production,
this was not the approach that was adopted. On the basis of these methodological
choices, the Stiglitz Report provides a comparative economic evaluation of domestic
work in France, the USA and Finland using relatively old data13 covering different
periods for each country14.
Using the method based on the average hourly wage of a generalist domestic employee,
household production is calculated to represent the equivalent of about 35% of GDP in
France (average 1995-2006), 40% in Finland and 30% in the USA over the same period.
These differences are not really explained. Standards of living in the US and France are
then compared by taking account of domestic work and then adding leisure time.
Disposable income per capita in France, which was only 66% of the equivalent American
living standard, rises to 83% of the American figure when state-provided services and
domestic work are added and to 87% if leisure time is included.
3) Advantages and disadvantages of putting a value on domestic work
Although they act as a counterbalance to explanations of the difference in standards of
living between France and the USA based solely on ‘preference for leisure’, these
estimations are still very close to a ‘fiction economy’ (Chadeau, Fouquet, 1981),
particularly because incorporating such a volume of services into GDP at this valuation
would transform everything else. Moreover, this type of estimation has advantages and
disadvantages. Among its advantages are the fact that it reveals that the number of
hours devoted to such ‘work’ is greater than that devoted to paid work; it also lays bare
the links that exist between growth and the reduction in household production and
acknowledges the fundamental (and impressive) nature of women’s contribution to the
wealth of the nation, while at the same time underlining its invisibility and the fact that
it is underpaid. These various reasons explain why a whole section of the feminist
movement has advocated these measures and has sought above all to have these
activities recognised as work.
However, putting a monetary value on domestic work also has major disadvantages.
Firstly, acknowledging that what is done within households is ‘work’ that generates
output risks a reversion to social role theory, or even demands for payment (such as a
‘housewife’s wage’), since the contribution to national wealth is equivalent in value to
that produced by work done outside the home. A second risk is commodification. If what
is done within households and for the family by family members is regarded as
‘production’ that is identical in every way to that realised with a view to exchange then
there is a risk that the market principle will be extended to activities that have hitherto
been protected from it. As soon as a price is imputed to such activities, is there not a risk
that they could be identified as ‘sources of activity’ which, if they were exchanged on a
commercial basis, would extend the boundaries of GDP? The rhetoric around ‘sources of
employment’ in personal services clearly illustrates this (Devetter et al. 2009). And
13
14
Between the end of the 1990s (for some) and the mid-2000s.
8 years between the last wave of the time budget survey in the USA and France.
9
besides, an argument of this kind reduces households to micro production and
consumption units and may also lead to the confusion of types of activity that in fact
have very different purposes (earning an income and practice of an activity that confers
social status in the case of paid work, responsibility for the well-being of family
members for the others). This confusion of different categories of activity could also lead
to the contamination of organising principles and processes. If what happens in
households is work in exactly the same way as that carried on outside the home, then it
must conform to the same principles of effectiveness and efficiency and those
undertaking it must be driven by the same concern for productivity gains. There is an
enormous risk that a previously protected space could be subject to rationalisation and
colonisation. Finally, the greatest risk is perhaps that of monetisation, the result of
which would be to reduce a set of diversified activities to a single common (and very
inadequate) measure, on the basis of time budget surveys and conventions (principal
activity) that would considerably diminish the diversity and affective and relational
content of the various activities.
Thus, as Lourdes Beneria (1999) noted, the debate between those who consider that
these various risks are preferable to the invisibility of women’s contribution (Beneria,
1999; Albelda et al. 2009; Folbre, 2003) and the others (Barbara Bergmann, for example,
who regards this kind of exercise as futile15) is far from resolved. In order to progress,
we undoubtedly need to enquire into the objective being pursued by those who wish to
incorporate the value of domestic work into GDP. It would appear that they are seeking
to gain recognition for women’s contribution and its lack of remuneration and to
promote a better division of paid and unpaid work between men and women. Thus the
main question that needs to be answered is whether, in order to advance along this
route, monetisation is a process that has to be undergone, at the risk not only of
destroying the irreducible nature of the various human activities (Méda, 1995, 1999)
but also promoting a concept that is unlikely to be sustainable and likely to be associated
with enormous risks (Fair, 2011; Cassiers, Thiry, 2009). However, this approach
remains problematic since, like attempts to monetise the product of voluntary work
(UN, 2003; ILO, 2011), it is likely to reinforce the belief that it is impossible to construct
cognitive reference points other than those based on money in order to highlight the
importance of an activity and to emphasise different values.
Two recent attempts, based on monetisation (and therefore open to the criticisms just
outlined above) are particularly interesting. One was proposed by a panel of American
researchers with a view to estimating the value of non-market activities and extending
national accounts by adding satellite accounts that would widen the definition of
productive activities. These additional accounts would take into consideration
household production and the activities of the state and of NGOs in order to capture
more accurately the outputs and outcomes of education and health services (Abraham,
Mackie, 2005). One of the advances made in this report is the development of an
See Beneria, 1999. For Bergmann, it would be preferable to expend energy on improving women’s integration
into paid work by providing nurseries and maternity leave, improving pay, fighting discrimination, etc.
15
10
account that more accurately captures the formation and development of (i.e.
investment in) human capital16.
Reversing the traditional perspective and taking note of the fact that it is no longer
physical infrastructures that are the most important factors in ensuring that our
societies are sustainable over the long term but that improvement of the ‘human
machine’ is the most important activity and therefore the heart of production, Nancy
Folbre suggests compiling a register of all care activities, whether it be those carried out
without charge within the family or those provided outside the home (Albelda et al.
2009). What is important is what makes it possible to develop individuals, thus
principally care work. At a stroke, all those tasks that were regarded as less important
because they involved people and not material production and were intended to
improve well-being and provide care and not anything else become essential. ‘Care work
is not just a cornerstone of our economy – it is a rock-bottom foundation. Care work
provides the basis for our human infrastructure, and we need it to navigate through life
as surely as we need our roads and bridges’ (page 2). Having estimated the value of and
added up all the forms of care17 in Massachusetts, Folbre calculates that if the value of
the state’s GDP were extended to include unpaid and paid care work in the same
account, then it would represent 36% of the total.
III)
Beyond GDP: the search for indicators that take full account of gender
inequalities
Is there another way of making gender inequalities visible and taking them into account
without incurring the risks associated with monetisation? Such an approach would have
to involve developing measures highlighting gender differences in access to goods,
resources, rights and responsibilities. It would fit well with the more general search for
indicators to supplement or even replace GDP and would explore different (though not
exclusive) avenues to those examined in the course of monetisation. After all, the purely
economic evaluations of household production outlined above take no account of the
idea that it is by reducing disparities, and particularly those in equality between men
and women, that the conditions will be created for sustainability and lasting human
development. This requires a reduction in the disparities between men and women both
inside and outside the labour market and a narrowing of the gap in access to goods and
resources18.
1) The search for new indicators of wellbeing
Such an account would formally recognize the investments families make in preparing children for lives
as productive members of society, including the necessary foundations in former education and health”
(Abraham, Mackie, eds. 2005, p.4).
17
paid care work, unpaid care work, government investment in care
18
An idea promoted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) since 1990 in its series of Human
Development Reports.
16
11
Growing awareness of environmental constraints, of the decline in natural resources
and of the constant increase in economic and social inequalities has renewed awareness
of the limitations of GDP and the limits to growth. Apart from those on which we have
dwelt earlier in the paper and which have to do with the socially constructed boundary
between productive and non-productive activities, it should be noted that GDP accords a
positive value to all activities mediated through the market, tells us nothing about the
distribution of the wealth produced and is confined to estimations of activity flows
without taking account of (social, environmental and human) assets and their use or
abuse (over-exploitation of these assets, for example).
The common point and, in many cases, the starting point for the development of ‘new
indicators of wellbeing and development’ is an explicit desire on the part of those
involved to compensate for the exclusively economic assessments of progress through
the use of socio-economic indicators (Gadrey, Jany-Catrice, 2006) that attempt to
capture more accurately the human, social and environmental issues at stake. All of
them are concerned to investigate the way in which a good measure of a society’s wealth
and well-being, as well as its progress, might be constructed, usually with the intention
of breaking with the dominant economic or monetary indicators. These initiatives have
proliferated constantly since the early 1990s and are very diverse. They have been
launched by international actors (the UNDP and the indexes of human development; the
World Bank and adjusted net savings; the OECD and the Social Institutions and Gender
Index (SIGI) etc.) and by researchers. Thus at the beginning of the 2000s, L. Osberg and
A. Sharpe (2001) developed a multidimensional indicator of economic well-being and L.
Miringoff and L.-M. Miringoff developed a social health indicator for the USA (1999).
More rarely, although this avenue is being increasingly explored (European Council,
2011; Fair, 2011), projects start from the assumption that it falls in part to citizens to
define, in ways that remain to be determined, the form taken by the social and
environmental wealth they are seeking to preserve.
Although indicators of gender inequalities do exist, they have never up to now acquired
the degree of awareness acquired by the indicators of sustainability that are regarded as
neutral or indifferent to this question. One of the reasons for this is that the indicators
not only shape our view of the world but also influence social debate, in which the
question of gender inequalities does not play a sufficiently prominent role. Incidentally,
the initiatives that have made most progress in fully incorporating the gender issue into
their agendas have their origins in developing countries and tend to apply more to them.
This is the case with the Gender Status Index, which is based on an estimation of the
difference between men and women in three major dimensions: social power
(capabilities), which is made up of indicators on education and health, such as school
enrolment rates, literacy rates, child health, mortality rates, life expectancy, HIV
infection rates, etc.; economic power (opportunities), in which there are indicators of
income, access to employment and to resources such as wages depending on the sector,
time spent on work (including domestic work), etc. ; and political power (agency), which
12
is made up indicators of women’s rate of representation in ‘decision-making positions’
in the public sector (parliaments, ministries, etc.) and in civil society (political parties,
trade unions, company boards of management). However, awareness of this indicator as
applied to a number of African countries remains low19.
In reality, gender is seldom at the heart of the measures or debates on the ‘new
indicators’. The American social health indicator makes no mention of it, focusing
instead on target groups such as children, adolescents and the elderly (Miringoff et
Miringoff, 1999), while the French Bip40 mentions it only sporadically (Concialdi, 2009)
and captures gender inequalities in the same way as it does social or age-related
inequalities20. Finally, gender is seldom introduced as a variable in initiatives that focus
on environmental values and have been largely responsible for the renewed interest in
the ‘new indicators of wealth’. Whether they use indicators that are physical
(environmental footprint [Boutaud, Gondran, 2007]) or monetary (adjusted net savings
[Stiglitz Commission, 2009]), environmental indicators also tend to adopt an approach
that disregards the question of gender equality.
The conclusions that can be drawn from our investigations into these new indicators
with regard to gender inequalities are ambiguous. On the one hand, even though they
were developed with something of a ‘delay’, some interesting initiatives launched by the
UNDP have sought to take greater account of these inequalities. These efforts deserve to
be noted21, but they are rather few in number and sometimes difficult to interpret.
Furthermore, they have attracted relatively little media attention and have not been
widely disseminated, even when they emanate from legitimate actors. This is what we
examine below.
2) The gender-related development index
Concerned about the harmful consequences of the IMF and World Bank’s structural
adjustment programmes, the UNDP, in its first report, constructed a simple indicator, the
The Gender Status Index was published in a report compiled by the United Nations Economic
Commission for Africa (UNECA). ‘The African Gender and Development Index’ is the name of a composite
index representing inequalities between the sexes in Africa. This index was officially launched during the
4th African Development Forum in Ethiopia on 12 October 2004. The AGDI is made up of two indicators:
the Gender Status Index and the African Women's Progress Scoreboard, (AWPS). It is intended to equip
African decision-makers with a tool for measuring gender inequality, identifying the progress made in the
implementation of conventions ratified by African countries and democratising statistics in Africa.
20 Before launching an attack on the initiators of these composite indexes, it would undoubtedly be
necessary to identify, on a case by case basis, the dimensions and variables for which the gender issue can
be regarded as inappropriate (the issue is not couched in these terms, price indices used in some
indicators), the dimensions and variables for which data are unavailable, e.g. because the unit of account
in the statistics is the household (rates of over-indebtedness), and the dimensions and variables for which
the data exist but have not been analysed.
21 In the 20 years that it has been publishing the Human Development Report, the UNDP has modified its
key indicators in more or less radical ways. A ‘gender inequality indicator’ has been produced. This is
intended to replace all the gender inequality indicators it had produced previously. (Human Development
Report 2010, ‘ The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development’.
19
13
Human Development Index (HDI), that measures countries’ achievements in three
fundamental dimensions of human development, namely access to economic resources,
education and health (UNDP, 1990). It was not until five years after the first publication
of the HDI, however, that a subsequent report raised the question of gender in the
following terms22: ‘… the pace of development – robust as it has been in the past five
decades – has been accompanied by rising disparities within nations and between
nations. The most persistent of these has been gender disparity, despite a relentless
struggle to equalize opportunities between men and women’ (UNDP, 1995, p. iii). The
international organisation further notes that it is women who are principally affected by
poverty and illiteracy: 70% of poor people and two thirds of those who are illiterate are
women.
From 1995 onwards, the international organisation introduced other key indicators,
among them a so-called ‘gender-related development index’ (GDI) and a ‘gender
empowerment measure’ (GEM) that assesses women’s participation in economic and
political life.
Box: Construction of the gender-related development index
The index is calculated on the basis of the following formula:
{(pF x If 1-α)+(pM x Im1-α)}
where
pF and pM are the share of men and women in the population respectively
If and Im are the male and female indicators in each dimension (e.g.: life expectancy for men and women)
α measures the aversion to inequality. In the UNDP’s GDI, this aversion is allocated the coefficient 223.
The equation is then written as follows:
{(pF x If -1)+(pM x Im-1)}
Source: UNDP, 2008, Human Development Report, 2007-2008, p. 355
In Chapter 4, which is entitled ‘Valuing Women’s Work’.
The value 2 is a measure of the penalty for gender inequality. The higher the value, the more heavily a
society is ‘penalised’ by the fact of having inequalities.
22
23
14
The gender-related development index takes as its starting point the observation that
human development requires not only access to economic, educational and health
resources but also a reduction in inequalities between men and women24 in access to
these basic capabilities. In calculating the index, a penalty is applied for gender
inequalities in the HDI’s three dimensions, namely life expectancy, literacy and standard
of living (income). Thus the idea is not so much to identify the inequalities between men
and women but to estimate what an indicator that was ‘equitably distributed’ between
men and women would be (see box25). Its main disadvantages are the small number of
dimensions used (a standard criticism of the HDI) and, in particular, that it is not, strictly
speaking, an indicator of gender inequalities. After all, given the method by which it is
constructed, a low GDI score may reflect gender inequalities or simply a generally low
level of human development. Nevertheless, the first results obtained for 130 countries as
early as 1995 produced some edifying findings, including the fact that no society treats
women as well as men and that sociological equality between the sexes does not depend
on income levels in a given society (UNDP, 1995, p. 83). In the 2009 ranking, the USA
was only in 19th place, while the Scandinavian countries, together with Canada, Australia
and Iceland, were riding high, without it being possible immediately to identify which
aspects of these results were due to gender inequalities, on the one hand, and to poor
performance in the constituent dimensions of the HDI, on the other.
24Inequality
of achievement between men and women.
The GDI can be seen as an indicator of development that has been penalised for gender inequalities on
the basis of a ‘coefficient of aversion’ to inequality. These penalties are designed in such a way that the GDI
is reduced either when ‘performance’ in the various dimensions is poor or when the gap between the
genders widens. For the same level of human development, the greater the disparities are, the lower a
country’s index is.
25
15
Table1. Gender-related development index (2009)
Country
Australia
Norway
Iceland
Canada
Sweden
France
Netherlands
Finland
Spain
Ireland
Belgium
Denmark
Switzerland
Japan
Italy
Luxembourg
UK
New Zealand
USA
Germany
Greece
Hong Kong
Austria
GDI
ranking
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
Source: Human Development Report, 2009
3) The indicator of women’s participation in political and economic life
The indicator of women’s participation in political and economic life seeks to measure
women’s capacity for action and is known as the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM).
It focuses on ‘women’s participation in political decision-making, their access to
professional opportunities and their earning power’. Its starting point is the observation
that women are frequently ‘excluded from such participation and are effectively
disenfranchised’ (UNDP, 1995, p. 72); its purpose is to compare women’s empowerment
in these areas relative to men in different countries. The metric used provides a practical
illustration of this. Thus the GEM focuses on women’s share of parliamentary seats and
their share in professional and managerial jobs, which are combined with a measure of
the share of women’s earnings in total earnings from work. This indicator shows, for
example, that across the world women hold only 15% of the seats in legislative
assemblies, with only two countries – Sweden and Rwanda - coming anywhere close to
perfect parity (UNDP, 2005, p. 77).
Various factors – some obvious, others obscure – have long prevented the UNDP from
calculating this indicator of women’s participation in political and economic life in the
case of France. The factors that have been cited range from the incompatibility of the
socio-occupational classifications to the shameful position that France would occupy if
the index were to be calculated.
16
However, since the publication of the 2007/2008 report, the GEM has at last included
France in its classifications. It is the Scandinavian countries that obtain the highest
scores on this index, while France and the USA fare relatively badly (Table 2).
Table 2. Gender Empowerment Measure (2009)
(countries with very high levels of human development)
Gender
Seats held in
empowerment parliament
measure
by women
Administrators
and managers
(% women)
Professional
and
technical
workers (%
of women)
Year in which a
women presided
over parliament
or one of the
chambers of
representatives
for the first time
Year in
which
women
first
obtained
the vote
1991
Rank
GEM
value
(% of total)
(% of total)
(% of total)
Earned
income
share
(%
women)
Sweden
1
0.909
47
32
51
0.67
Norway
2
0.906
36
31
51
0.77
1919,
1921
1913
Finland
3
0.902
42
29
55
0.73
1906
1991
Denmark
4
0.96
38
28
52
0.74
1915
1950
Netherlands
5
0.882
39
28
50
0.67
1919
1998
Belgium
6
0.874
36
32
49
0.64
2004
Australia
7
0.870
30
37
57
0.70
Iceland
8
0.859
33
30
56
0.62
Germany
9
0.852
31
38
50
0.59
1919,
1948
1902,
1962
1915,
1920
1918
New Zealand
10
0.841
34
40
54
0.69
1893
2005
Spain
11
0.835
34
32
49
0.52
1931
1999
Canada
12
0.830
25
37
56
0.65
1972
Switzerland
13
0.822
27
30
46
0.62
1917,
1960
1971
UK
15
0.790
20
34
47
0.67
1992
Singapore
16
0.786
24
31
45
0.53
1918,
1928
1947
France
17
0.779
20
38
48
0.61
1944
..
USA
18
0.767
17
43
56
0.62
2007
Portugal
19
0.753
28
32
51
0.60
Austria
20
0.744
27
27
48
0.40
1920,
1965
1931,
1976
1918
Italy
21
0.741
20
34
47
0.49
1945
1979
Ireland
22
0.722
15
31
53
0.56
1982
Israel
23
0.705
18
30
52
0.64
1918,
1928
1948
United Arab
Emirates
25
0.691
23
10
21
0.27
2006
..
1993
1987
1974
1972
1977
..
..
1927
2006
17
Greece
28
0.677
15
28
49
0.51
1952
2004
Czech
Republic
Slovenia
31
0.664
16
29
53
0.57
1920
1998
34
0.641
10
34
56
0.61
1946
..
Barbados
37
0.632
14
43
52
0.65
1950
..
Cyprus
48
0.603
14
15
48
0.58
1960
..
Japan
57
0.567
12
9
46
0.45
1993
South Korea
61
0.554
14
9
40
0.2
1945,
1947
1948
Malta
74
0.531
9
19
41
0.45
1947
1996
Qatar
88
0.445
0
7
25
0.28
2003
..
..
Countries for which data are not made available, or only partially
Luxembourg
..
..
23
..
..
0.57
1919
1989
Liechtenstei
n
Hong Kong,
China (SAR)
Andorra
..
..
24
..
..
..
1984
..
..
..
..
30
42
0.73
..
..
..
..
25
..
..
..
1970
..
Brunei
Darussalam
Kuwait
..
..
..
35
37
0.59
—
..
..
..
3
..
..
0.36
2005
..
Source : Human Development Report, 2009
Left: the 3 variables that make up the GEM. Right: some supplementary qualitative
information on women’s access to rights.
The purpose of these two indicators is to capture the multidimensional nature of gender
inequalities by taking account of levels of development, which crude measures of income
and consumption inequalities cannot do26. They show, for example, that only countries
with high levels of human development also have high gender-related indices and
gender empowerment measures. In this regard, Japan and France are exceptions, since
both these countries have high GDI scores but fare poorly on the GEM.
4 ) Towards a gendered indicator of human poverty?
Following on from a citizens’ conference held in the Nord-Pas de Calais region in 2009,
which recommended that ‘all the dimensions in which gender inequalities are at work
should be taken into account’27 we examine, in a totally experimental way, the
possibilities for constructing a gendered indicator of human poverty applied to the
French regions.
Such a project is consistent with the European Charter for the Equality of Men and
Women in Local Life, which affirms the importance of implementing and promoting the
26
NGOs are often in the forefront of developing these indicators, such as the ONGs Care and Social Watch
(index of gender equity).
27
Public Citizen’s panel opinion declared in November 2009 after a three months’s citizen debate.
18
right to equality and emphasises that ‘it is essential that local and regional government
take the gender dimensions fully into account in their policies, their organisation and
their practices’ (Cochard, Gadrey, 2009, pp. 175-176). In order to construct such
policies, it is essential to have available a set of data on the comparative situation of men
and women in respect of access to employment, health and education, as well as data
that can be used to measure women’s involvement in economic and political life.
The indicator we are proposing here is a variant of the human poverty index and is
based on the scores for each French region in three dimensions: differences in life
expectancy between men and women, differences in education between men and
women 28 and the differences between men and women in long-term unemployment29.
Calculated on the basis of the cubic mean of the three dimensions, this gendered human
poverty index produces the following results (see Table 3): the Ile de France heads the
rankings because life expectancy in the region favours women and the long-term
unemployment rate is relatively low for both sexes. Conversely, the Nord-Pas de Calais
region not only suffers from low social indicators, as previous studies of social health
have shown (Jany-Catrice, Zotti, 2009), but is also the region that scores least well in
terms of human poverty considered from the perspective of gender inequalities.
Table 3. Gendered human poverty index for the French regions
Region
Ile-de-France
Alsace
Midi-Pyrénées
Rhône-Alpes
Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
Lorraine
Aquitaine
Corsica
Franche-Comté
Auvergne
Picardy
Languedoc-Roussillon
Centre
Limousin
Pays de la Loire
Poitou-Charentes
Burgundy
Brittany
Champagne-Ardenne
Upper Normandy
Gendered
human
poverty
index
5.18
5.25
5.54
5.82
5.87
5.99
6.04
6.07
6.07
6.11
6.12
6.16
6.35
6.54
6.6
6.7
6.77
6.77
6.82
6.92
Rank
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
9
8
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
28
Determined on the basis of the shares of men and women without qualifications. Sources: Insee, 1999 and
2007 Population Censuses, main analyses.
29
Insee data.
19
Lower Normandy
Nord-Pas-de-Calais
6.98
7.36
21
22
Nayrac, Jany-Catrice, 2011
Taken as a whole, these experimental studies show that it is possible to assert values
other than purely economic ones, and to do so by adopting techniques other than
monetisation. While they need to be consolidated, they do provide a basis for
considering the possibilities for deliberative democracy around these issues
Conclusion
Determining what (or who) counts and how it is to be counted (Waring, 1988) is not a
new idea. However, the interest in developing new indicators of wealth provides an
opportunity to revisit this question, and in particular to consider it in terms of the
relationship between women and wealth. Although numerous research and citizens’
networks have been calling for more than 30 years for the introduction of a satellite
account of household production, which would undoubtedly help to change attitudes
(Beneria, 1999), it has still not materialised. Such a project will have to distance itself
somewhat from the proposal put forward in the Stiglitz Report (2009), in terms of both
method and content. As far as method is concerned, it is essential to establish forums for
debating the ways in which household production should be valued; the national
statistical information centre could be the appropriate institution. And as far as content
is concerned, the various options (ways of taking domestic work into account) will have
to be examined from every angle and their advantages and disadvantages discussed.
Our work is also intended to encourage the development of new indicators of wealth
that place the issue of gender at the heart of their agendas. Although they often claim to
be ‘progressive’, in fact very few of the ‘new indicators’ have so far gone down this route.
20
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