All those thousands of hours that Australians put towards unpaid household work and care – cooking, cleaning and caring for family members – are an essential thread that keeps our economy stitched together.

But they’re not recognised in official economic statistics.

My new research puts a dollar value on what all this unpaid labour is worth to the economy: about A$688 billion. That’s equivalent to around one-third of gross domestic product – and is mostly contributed by women.

The System of National Accounts, which guides how countries worldwide define “production” and measure the size of their economy, is limited to activities that have a price tag or market wage.

Unpaid work and care falls outside this official definition.

In my new academic paper, published in the Economic Record, I calculate a dollar value of this unpaid productive activity by adding up how much it would cost if we were to pay someone an hourly wage do this work as their paid job.

For example, we can value each unpaid hour looking after children as the equivalent of a childcare worker’s average hourly wage.

Each hour spent on housework can be........

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