Chef, cleaner, driver, tutor, mentor, manager. These are among the roles that stay-at-home parents fulfil daily as part of their unpaid work – that often comes with night shifts.

Many would agree that their role is “priceless”. They are investing in the future generation. But can a price be put on this work? What is the cost of a stay-at-home parent?

The subject came up last month when a woman was awarded almost €28,000 in compensation after doctors left a surgical gauze inside her abdomen following an intervention at Mater Dei Hospital 10 years ago.

The court noted she was a housewife so there was no loss of employment but this did not mean that her role had no value. It pegged the repayment to the minimum wage.

This is a common practice in Maltese courts. In 2012, a housewife who was seriously injured when the Save-On supermarket collapsed in Paola in 1990 was awarded €34,000 in damages. The court used the minimum wage as a yardstick.

In 2010, a court ordered the payment of €69,000 in compensation to the husband and children of a 46-year-old housewife who was killed in a traffic accident 10 years before. The earnings of the woman, who also had a medical condition, were considered as equivalent to a minimum wage.

But should the worth of a stay-at-home parent be calculated based on minimum wage? The first step is understanding what housework entails.

‘No genuine respect’

“We wake up at work and sleep at work. The hours are long. It’s a lot of jobs rolled into one: cleaning, cooking, driving around and there is the mental juggling of the diverse work that is very draining,” said a woman who shelved her teaching career to focus on her four children.

She feels there is “no genuine respect” for what stay-at-home parents do.

“When I was working, I never had time for my children. I did not like that. The care we are giving our children is irreplaceable,” she said.

Apart from the physical work, she added: “There is the burden of psychologically nurturing the children while you are, yourself, being challenged psychologically.”

This burden has been named the “emotional labour”, or putting another’s feelings and desires before your own.

Housework is defined as the unremunerated work of maintaining a household. The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) lists the categories that involve shopping for groceries, household chores (cleaning, cooking, caring for dependent children and adults) and maintenance, financial and administrative matters and management and planning tasks.

The next step is understanding who carries out these jobs. According to the Gender Equality Index 2023, issued by the EIGE last October, women across most EU countries still take on the bulk of the responsibilities at home.

Data on women’s and men’s involvement in unpaid care in Malta show that more women (32%) than men (16%) engage in everyday caring for others. This includes caring for children and sick and elderly relatives. When it comes to cooking and housework activities, 78% of women and 63% of men report doing such tasks every day.

Calculating the value of housework

So how can the value of housework be quantified? Economist Kirsten Cutajar Miller notes that measuring the economic value of these productive activities may be difficult as these are often undertaken outside the market and do not always have an assigned market value.

The alternative to this assessment is to look at the value of wage rates used to derive these activities – the opportunity cost approach.

“Using this approach, we look at the value the person undertaking the housework would have earned had they engaged in paid labour. However, this method may be flawed as it implies that the value of the housework changes with the person doing it. For example, the value of the housework undertaken by a high-income earner would be greater than that earned by a low-income earner,” she says.

Cutajar Miller notes that the EIGE states that 91% of women with children spend at least an hour per day on housework, compared with 30% of men with children, while employed women spend about 2.3 hours daily on housework compared to 1.6 hours for employed men.

“Using the average wage rate for employed women and men for Malta, which for Q4 2023 was €1,747 for women and €1,905 for men, we might value the monthly average value of housework at €753.40 and €571.5 for women and men, respectively. For a two-adult household (one woman, one man) this represents 46% of the average disposable household income,” she says.

Sharing domestic burdens

With this in mind, would it make sense to offer compensation to housewives?

In 2016, experts forming the Parliamentary Committee for Family Affairs recommended that compensation should be given to housewives.

This was shot down by experts who said it would backfire by discouraging women to enter the labour market – where they were needed. The Malta Employers’ Association said that implications for employers were that it could potentially lead to a fall in labour supply and increase government expenditure.

In many cases, couples choose who, if anyone, will slow down on work to handle the children. They find a way to work it out. But issues crop up if the relationship breaks down. The person who slowed down their career ends up at a financial disadvantage.

The courts in various countries are taking note of this. In Britain, a woman was awarded £400,000 (€470,000) for “sacrificing” her career as a solicitor so she could look after her two children. She won the compensation on top of an equal share of the family’s wealth after her divorce.

A Chinese divorce court ordered a man to pay his wife the equivalent of $7,700 (€7,000) as compensation for housework during their five-year marriage.

Financial compensation can help. But it is not necessarily the long-term solution to these situations.

In a recent article, The Economist wrote: “Many women have no option but to leave the workforce when they start a family – the cost of childcare might outweigh the benefits of a second salary, particularly if working hours and earnings are reduced to accommodate family responsibilities. Legal and financial recognition of unpaid domestic work would change this calculation.

“But it would be simpler (and fairer) to share domestic burdens more evenly. The division of housework is also unequal in the West, with women shouldering most domestic chores and childcare responsibilities. And family-leave policies are similarly disproportionate, with paternity leave being an average of just 1.7 weeks across the European Union’s 27 countries.”

Malta is at the lower end of the spectrum. In August 2022, fathers got 10 days’ paternity leave on full pay as opposed to the previous one day. This contrasts to mothers who benefit from 18 weeks, 14 of which are paid.