When Unpaid Cooking, Cleaning and Child Care Get a Dollar Value, Income Inequality Shrinks

PERI’s Nancy Folbre and Leila Gautham discuss their new research that shows that unpaid work used to significantly cushion inequality through the provision of many services, but that cushion has been thinning for 50 years.

“The income gap between households near the top and those near the bottom between 1965 and 2018 grew around 40% using conventional measures. Once we added unpaid work, this gap grew by 66%”