Calculating the value of unpaid work

As we’ve talked about in previous articles, disputes about sharing the mental load and the division of the unpaid work associated with family life are often a cause of stress within career families. Women still tend to shoulder the burden – doing over 60% more unpaid work than men according to the Office for National Statistics with the associated impact on their careers and wellbeing that accompanies this additional and often under-acknowledged workload.

This tension in families is something that comes up frequently in our working parents’ coaching programmes and our advice is always about couples approaching it more like a work project by looking at everything that needs to get done and then dividing by preference, skill set and time with what either of you can’t stomach doing, being outsourced and the cost of that accepted.

With that in mind, we love this calculator from the ONS, which enables you to estimate the salaried value of the unpaid work you do. This certainly helps quantify where you might want to think about outsourcing and how the balance of unpaid work in your family is actually divided, adding much-needed objectivity to an often-subjective discussion. https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/dvc376/index.html