The invisible work of caring and family
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More people working more hours means higher household incomes and GDP. But that perspective suffers from an enormous blindspot: the value of the non-market labor that parents perform at home and in their communities. Every time a parent spends an hour less caring for a child or preparing a meal or volunteering at school or coaching a team, and an hour more sitting at a desk earning a wage, we supposedly become “richer.” When the wage earned is then spent paying someone else to do that which the family once did for itself, GDP jumps yet again.
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GDP measures paid work. So if a parent stays at home to care for their child (or a spouse or a parent), it isn't included in GDP. But if they hire a nanny or send the child to a day care so they can go to work, suddenly two jobs are created for GDP purposes - the childcare provider is doing paid work, and the parent is doing paid work.
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Cass points out that our government is incentivized to increase GDP as that's the metric being used to measure the "economy", so they bias tax incentives towards sending kids to day care because that makes the "economy" look better (the "economy" serves as an accountability sink, to use Dan Davies's term). But it doesn't always reflect what people actually want to do, because the work that people do because they care is outside of the system that only recognizes certain kinds of work as valuable.
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I connected this back to what I read in Riane Eisler's book, The Real Wealth of Nations, where she wrote about this gendered economic double standard, where masculine work is valued economically and paid for, and feminine caring work is seen as owed for free to the men in the family, because a woman's "job" is to care for others.
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When a far-right conservative thinker and a leading feminist advocate are saying the same thing about the blind spot of our culture to unpaid caring work, that's interesting to me. The ways in which they want to address it are completely disparate, of course: Cass advocates for the government to support families with children directly with a cash-based family benefit (although I suspect he'd find a way to exclude poor black or brown families) rather than offer a tax incentive for childcare, Eisler thinks we need to tear down the whole capitalist, colonialist domination system (where certain people wield power over others) to create a partnership system based in mutual respectful and caring relations.
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I lean more towards Eisler's approach that “the real wealth of a nation lies in the quality of its human and natural capital”. What would a society look like where we optimized for helping each person reach their potential, rather than maximizing wealth for the few who happened to win their dice rolls? What would happen if we invested in people's access to food, shelter, healthcare, and basic needs?
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And it's not theoretical - countries in Europe invest more in supporting their people than the US, and people seem much happier there. They don't work as hard, and they have time for their families (and somehow pay similar tax rates). The "downside" of this is that they also aren't as "productive" in a GDP growth sense, possibly in part due to the "hustle" culture of the US that is driven by fundamental insecurity (if you lose your job in the US, you lose everything - healthcare, money, status).
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This discrepancy between paid and unpaid work is top of mind for me at the moment, as I'm on paternity leave for my third child. Even though the baby sleeps a lot, it's still a lot of work to prep and clean the bottles to feed her, change the diapers, run and fold the laundry, etc. Plus my wife needs support as she recovers from the birth, my older kids need attention, I need to run errands for house supplies; even with my in-laws helping, I spend all day doing family and home tasks, and am exhausted by the evening. And I don't get paid for it because it's not part of the paid economy - as a self-employed coach, there's no money coming in if I'm focused on my family.
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I choose to do it because investing in my family is important to me. And I am fortunate and privileged to have the resources and support I do - I can afford to take time off during this time, we have relatives that can help us for an extended period, and my wife works at a company with a generous maternity leave policy. And it's still hard.
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And now for the normal personal development content…
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LinkedIn: These are ideas that have helped my clients (or myself), and that I share via LinkedIn to help a wider audience, and archive here.
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- What do you do when circumstances change? Seth Godin wrote a post on Facing the Future where he shared that our options are Deny, Give Up, Control or Respond. To be effective, you need to avoid denial, to understand the new reality and accept it. You can't respond effectively to change if you're not starting from what's actually happening. I also like his duality between giving up and controlling as opposite polarities that create a false binary choice. The answer lies somewhere in the murky middle, and so exploring the territory between the extremes is what allows us to find a meaningful conscious response.
- Find your own path. This was the main message of my podcast recording with Jolie Downs on her Career Wanderlust podcast. American culture tends to treat careers as races where getting "there" fastest is the goal, where "there" might be a promotion, a title, a net worth number, or something else. But we each have our own path. And our careers and lives will last decades for most of us. So take the time to explore and find the path that's right for you, rather than sprint down the path somebody else maps for you.
- Failure is how you grow. I first learned this from my mentor Jon Williams, when he explained that you never know how much you are capable of unless you occasionally take on more than you can handle, and fail. Otherwise, you are playing it too safe (only signing up for jobs you know you can do) and never truly testing yourself. Jon recently participated in a LinkedIn Live panel on Learning From Failure: Embracing Setbacks as Valuable Growth Lessons to continue sharing that lesson.
- What's stopping you from achieving your goals - will or skill? Skill used to be the blocker - it was hard to figure out how to do something if you hadn't done it before. But that is no longer true. There are so many sources of information now (YouTube, Reddit, ChatGPT, blogs) that will tell you how to do anything you can imagine. If you decide something is important to you, you will figure out how to do it. I share my example of writing a book, but then failing to market it - it wasn't that I didn't know what I needed to do, I just didn't execute the necessary actions.
- I spoke with Lila Cantor on her Confidently Own Your Narrative podcast, where I shared that the narrative we tell about ourselves and the identities we present are choices we can make consciously or unconsciously. When we are making them unconsciously, we keep living out the same narratives because we are limited by the identities imposed on us by others or by a younger version of ourselves. By letting go of those identities, we can consciously create new narratives that open up new possibilities for ourselves. And if we confidently own those choices, we can create a more aligned and energetic life.
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A few articles continuing the theme of gender and patriarchy:
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- What Makes Women Clean? where Anne Helen Petersen investigates the survey result that "women spend more than twice as much time allocated to household work than men, even when they are single or do not have children". While some might explain this as evolutionary or genetic, she points out that there are men who clean, "and almost all of them were either 1) raised by single mothers or 2) spent time in the military. They were socialized, over an extended period, to understand cleanliness and multi-tasking as essential. ... Women aren’t better cleaners or multi-taskers; we don’t “like” it more. We do it, if we do it, because we know that if we don’t do it, chances are very high that our worth will be subtly or pointedly called into question." Another example of how "clean culture" is constructed is that the invention of vacuum cleaners and dishwashers was expected to save tremendous time for people, and yet women somehow spend even more time cleaning now because we collectively raised the standards of what "clean" means.
- I'm a feminist and I think it's harder to be a man than a woman, by Celeste Davis. Davis explains how patriarchy doesn't serve most men either, as it restricts their ability to emotionally connect in friendships and relationships. "Men suffer under patriarchy because patriarchy is a system set up by a few men over everyone else - including most men. It is a system that allows for the most greedy, aggressive and selfish to rise to the top and dominate over everyone else. ... To #smashthepatriarchy is not to smash men - it is to smash this system that makes men miserable. Smash the too-small box that is making men lonely and sick and estranged from the full range of their humanity."
- Parris Goebel Is Changing the Way Women Move, by Coralie Kraft in the New York Times Magazine. I was fascinated by this dance video for Justin Bieber's song Sorry when it came out in 2015, and reading this piece made me realize that part of what was fascinating was Goebel's choreography - "Goebel’s boundary-pushing aesthetic rethinks not just gender but the entire idea of sexiness. In her vision, sensuality — an awareness of our bodies and senses — feels more important than sexuality. She takes gut feelings and makes them concrete through dance."
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Thanks for reading! See you in a couple weeks!
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I sang in the Stanford Chamber Chorale when I was a grad student many years ago. For Stanford's Reunion weekend, a recent alum organized a Reunion Sing, where a few dozen alums sang with the current singers in gorgeous Memorial Church. My voice held up better than I expected and it was delightful to co-create beautiful music once again.
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This is the Too Many Trees newsletter, where I share what I’ve been writing and reading in the realm of leadership and personal development. My executive coaching practice is centered around the idea that we are more effective in moving towards our goals when we become more conscious and intentional in focusing our time and attention, and learn how our unconscious patterns are holding us back. If you know somebody that could benefit from my perspective, please forward this to them or let them know they can set up a free intro chat with me.
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