My Family and Other Globalizers | Decoupling value from money alone

Throughout this time, I had to work hard at mentally decoupling the idea of “value” from money. Looking after my children and writing books that allowed me to tackle interesting issues in depth, were both valuable pursuits to me. Yet their monetary value was nil and negligible, respectively.

And so, it became clear to me that the struggle that many women face between work and parenting, needs to be recast as one about defining value, more specifically, about decoupling it from monetary recompense.

Most of us unreflexively link the concept of value with cash. The role of money in evaluating self-worth is undeniable. As a result, non-financially remunerated work, like that undertaken by stay-at-home parents, is devalued, regardless of how critical for the functioning of society it may be. The time and effort I spend comforting, teaching, dressing, feeding and ferrying the children about, is valued – in one iteration of the term - by my family.  But I was never able to fully feel valuable as “just” a mom. Even freelance journalism felt like a more substantial identity, not just because it was financially remunerated (however meagerly), but because it constituted a different kind of value creation to motherhood.

The problem of “value” lies at the heart of many gender-related issues. The idea that housework needed to be given a monetary value to expose the dependence of the formal economy on the unpaid/unacknowledged labour of caregivers (overwhelmingly women), has a long history. Think the 1970s Wages for Housework Campaign by Marxist-feminists.

But the philosophical conundrum of how “value” is judged remains unsolved. Is value particular or universal? Is it intrinsic to a “thing” itself, or is it something that is awarded by an extrinsic assessor who decides what is in fact of value?

Value can have both moral and monetary dimensions. A diamond is valuable because it costs a lot of money, while kindness is valuable because it is moral. In monetary terms, investment bankers are more valued than nuns. Yet many people would agree that Mother Teresa’s contribution to society has been more valuable than Dick Fuld’s.

The problem is that the moral variant of “value” is subjective, open to debate and cultural relativism. The monetary one seems more objective. The price of a diamond is fixed and quantifiable, but the value of parenting is not.

Money’s role in human society in fact arose from the need to find a supposedly “objective” way of allowing us to compare otherwise incommensurate objects. For example, a haircut, a heart transplant, an African safari, and a book, can all be compared on the basis of their monetary value, despite belonging to different categories of objects.

Yet, although money itself might be a neutral measure, the value system that underlies our money-based economy is far from purely rational or objective. The huge gulf in the earnings of a sanitation worker and a movie actor, for instance, are hardly indicative of their “objective” worth.

But money remains the most reliable and accepted definer of value that we have. As a result, non-financially remunerated work, like that undertaken by stay-at-home parents is devalued, regardless of how critical for the functioning of society it may be.

The key challenge that we collectively need to address – and this holds globally - is how we evolve into a society that allows individuals to combine and enjoy different kinds of value: paid, unpaid, socially useful and economically important. Parents – men and women – should be able to enjoy an amalgamation of choices, rather than the stark, work-life non-choice that is the experience of most people today.

But all that said, I wouldn’t mind being paid more for these columns! Here’s hoping my editor is reading this :)