Japanese women are missing out on around ¥111 trillion ($761 billion) in pay for a range of household tasks they do for free, an amount that’s roughly equivalent to a fifth of the country’s economy.
While men also engage in ¥32 trillion of unpaid labor around the home, that’s less than a third of what women do, according to a Cabinet Office report released in July. Together, the numbers reflect part of the wage gap between men and women in the world’s third largest economy, and they highlight the sheer amount of uncompensated work that gets done.
In the report, the value of unpaid work in 2021 was calculated based on the amount of time spent, multiplied by the average wage for each gender according to age.