The calculation of satellite accounts has shown the importance of the economic weight of unpaid work, of which a large part remains hidden in the calculation of regular indicators such as GDP. The satellite account, however, also reveals important gender inequalities, because the largest part of this invisible work, close to 70%, is performed by women. Invisible and non-accounted work, therefore, is mainly female. Figure 3 presents the economic value of the tasks carried out by women and men. Since the wage per hour is the same for all activities, figure 3 also shows the differences in time invested by men and women in unpaid work.

In all the activities analysed, women have a greater weight than men. Women contribute 62% of care work, 68% of household cleaning and maintenance, 70% of food preparation and 82% of clothing care, this being proportionally the most feminised task. Women’s participation in this type of work is much more important than that of men, and so the invisible economic contribution is too. If taken into account in the calculation of GDP, unpaid work performed by women would total 33,928 million hours and would represent 26.24% of GDP for 20101. If unpaid work were considered a sector of the economy, the part carried out by women would have an economic weight similar to that of the industrial sector.
Invisible and unaccounted work is mainly female. Nearly 70% of unpaid activities are performed by women
It is important to point out that the calculations presented here only include activities declared as “primary” in surveys on time use. This survey does not enable two simultaneous activities to be declared without hierarchising them: one must be the main, and the other the secondary activity. For example, if a person is ironing clothing and at the same time caring for their children, they must choose whether childcare or the ironing is their main activity. Given that domestic and care tasks on occasions are compatible, the calculation by the authors is conservative, therefore we could think that gender inequalities would be more significant in reality if all the time devoted and not only that declared as “primary” activities were taken into account.
In the majority of countries in our area, researchers have confirmed a reduction in the time devoted to domestic work in the last fifty years (Altintas and Sullivan, 2016). Diverse social changes have helped to encourage this tendency: technological advances that permit greater efficacy in the tasks, changes in customs, and the appearance of an offering adapted to these new habits (for example, the appearance of pre-prepared ready meals), the development of public and private care services, and the incorporation of women into the labour market. However, these changes have not taken place at the same speed nor with the same intensity in all countries, and in Spain the time devoted to unpaid work and its corresponding economic value is higher than in other societies (Altintas and Sullivan, 2016). This work is invisible but of great economic value, and this economic value should be taken into account when interpreting women’s labour activity patterns.
There is no single method for calculating the value of domestic tasks, and each of them necessarily involves certain starting budgets. The estimate we are presenting here is one of the possible estimates, published by the INE and based on data from 2010 (Angulo and Hernández, 2015).
First of all, it is necessary to identify the unpaid activities that are considered relevant within the “domestic tasks” label. In our case there were four:
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Household: those related with household cleaning, maintenance and repairs;
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Food: all activities related with culinary production, from cooking to washing the dishes or obtaining raw materials in the home destined for food (for example growing a vegetable garden);
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Clothing: washing clothes, ironing, dressmaking and repairing clothes;
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Care and attention to children, elderly people and dependent persons.
Furthermore, we have to calculate the time devoted to each of these tasks, including the journeys to reach the place where the activity will be undertaken. For this reason, data have been used from the Uses of Time Survey conducted by the Spanish Statistics Institute (INE) in 2009-2010. This survey uses a diary to measure the temps that a representative sample of residents in Spain devotes to different activities over the course of a day (INE, 2010).
If unpaid work performed by women were taken into account in the calculation of GDP, it would amount to 33,982 million hours and would represent some 26.24% of the GDP of 2010, with an economic weight similar to that of the industrial sector
To attribute an economic value to each task, there are two alternatives: or we take into account the wage of the person effectively performing the activity, understanding that this is what she effectively ceases to earn in the labour market when she devotes her time to unpaid tasks (opportunity cost), or alternatively to calculate the wage that would be paid to another person to make the task unpaid (substitution cost). The choice of one method or another is important, because work in the housework and caregiving sector is not remunerated with high salaries, while the person who effectively does the work can have a lower or higher . If we use the substitution cost, the result will be a lower estimate than if we use the opportunity cost, because the wage of domestic workers is lower than the average of workers in other sectors. In this study we use the substitution cost and assume a net wage of 9.09 euros per hours.
Finally, we must take into account also a series of production costs and intermediate costs. For example, to prepare food it is necessary to use ingredients acquired in the market, above all the ingredients on the dish, but also used are utensils (pans, electrical appliances. , etc.) or infrastructures that are worn down with each use. The estimate of intermediate costs is added to the previous calculation.