Uncovering the hidden value of unpaid work: a global history of marginalized metrics

Although economics derives its name from the Greek oikos nomos, or household management, the question of domestic labor, typically performed by women, has long been ignored in canonical conceptions of labor and value. But not by everyone. The canons of the economic discipline have obscured the problem by systematically marginalizing the work of economists and activists advocating for alternative methods to calculate the value of domestic work. This article provides a comprehensive review of a century of research on the contribution of unpaid work to the global economy and examines the mechanisms through which its exclusion became institutionalized within GDP and national accounting systems. It highlights how the reluctance to reform these mainstream measures has perpetuated well-known biases, despite generations of economists, particularly women, consistently demonstrating the feasibility and necessity of incorporating unpaid labor into economic assessment.