Every year, Californians spend roughly 16 billion hours cooking meals, cleaning homes, raising children, buying groceries, and caring for aging parents. Economists call this unpaid work “household production.” It adds up to about half as many hours as the entire state spends in paid work, yet it doesn’t show up in traditional measures of the economy.

 

With technical support from the California Department of Finance, the California Partners Project studied five major categories of household production. Our analysis is the first of its kind at the state level. It measures the time Californians spend on this work and the value of those hours.

 

Women perform 68.5% of household production work, more than two hours for every hour men spend, and they do the majority in every category measured. The gap is widest in cooking and childcare, where women do 77% and 75% of the work. Women’s share is conservatively estimated to be worth $163 billion to $268 billion a year.

 

We hope that this brief is a small step towards recognizing the full economic contribution of women, caregivers, and household managers, and can give policymakers a clearer picture of the magnitude and value of work that keeps California households running.