I understand that women tend to make choices that cause them to earn less money. However, as a society, we benefit hugely from people making these choices for which we do not properly compensate them to the tune of $1.2 billion a year.

> For 2018 (the most recent data available), the dollar value of women’s unpaid work in the U.S. was equal to 86% of all the economic activity recorded in the state of New York. In other years—say, the late 1990s and late 2000s—the value of women’s unpaid work even surpassed New York state GDP. And keep in mind this value is at the low end of the possible range because we use the federal minimum wage and not, for example, higher state minimum wages let alone market wages that correspond to the specific work being done.

> The UNDP Women and Development Report of 1995 conducted a time-use study that analyzed the amount of time women and men spend on paid and unpaid household and community work in thirty-one countries across the world, including countries classified as 'industrial, 'developing' and 'transition economies.'[12] They found that in almost every country studied women worked longer hours than men but received fewer economic rewards. The study found that in both the 'developing' and 'industrialized world', men received the "lion's share of income and recognition" for their economic inputs, while women's work remained "unpaid, unrecognized, and undervalued."[12]

The fact that we don't pay as much for the things women tend to do is the problem. We've created a world where if you choose to spend your life sitting in a cubicle, you can support yourself. But if you spend your life caring for the people around you, you cannot, your labor still has value, it's simply not compensated. This is a really bad incentive scheme. We want parents to spend time with their children, not just because children with present parents perform better, but because of course we do. We want smart, capable people to become social workers and teachers and pediatricians without sabotaging their finances. To put another way, the world would be made worse, if 20% of the people who are currently working in their homes, decided to become software engineers instead. The world would become better if 20% of software engineers decided they'd rather contribute to their homes and communities.

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2020/03/calculating-the-valu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unpaid_work#Gender_and_unpaid_...