What is She Worth? How to Value (Or Not to Value) a Woman’s Life

Women earn far less than men over their lifetimes, partly because they devote less time to paid employment. U.S. courts often ignore or undervalue women’s other productive activities: doing housework, preparing meals, caring for family members, and volunteering in the community. Some states allow consideration of the value of such activities in wrongful death suits but others do not.

Legal precedents reflect a long–but largely unexplored–history of gender bias in political economy that has been challenged by feminists since the mid-nineteenth century. The powerpoint presentation you can access here provided the basis for my recent presentation in the Feinberg lecture series at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The lecture provided a brief intellectual history of debates over the”unproductive housewife” that help explain the gender-biased assumptions that continue to distort U.S. policies. It described the tools that feminist economists today are using today to estimate the value of non-market work. However, it also emphasized the need for a truly interdisciplinary–rather than purely economistic–approach to the valuation of both non-market work and human life.