Why I hate these heres-how-much-the-work-done-in-the-home-is-worth studies...

Submitted by David on Thu, 2012-02-23 23:02

I recently came across another article of this sort (I can't bring myself to speak of it as a study).

Basically, it's a let's-add-up-all-the-tasks-a-stay-at-home-parent-might-do thing to come up with some outrageous number several times the median wage. This article compared to others of the sort is actually almost a bit conservative in coming up with a figure only twice the US median full-time wage.

The problems start right at the beginning:

Private Chef
Meal preparation is one of the major tasks of most homemakers. From breakfast to dinner, there is plenty of meal planning and cooking to be done. The American Personal Chef Association reports that its personal chefs make $200 to $500 a day. Grocery shopping is another chore that needs to be factored in. A homemaker must drive to the supermarket, purchase the food and deliver it to the home. Grocery delivery services charge a delivery fee of $5 to $10.

Total cost for services: $1,005 per five day work week x 52 weeks = $52,260 per year.

Where to start? The US median wage of a head chef / cook is about $40,000. Hiring such a cook would likely get you someone more experience and/or training than than average stay-at-home parent. In addition, to get their $40,000 median wage that median chef would seem to be putting in an average of 5.7 hours per day on food prep, less than that put in by the average stay at home parent I'd guess. (The French lead the OECD in time spent shopping, averaging 32 minutes per day, and the average American spends about 30 minutes per day cooking [src])

So what would happen if this stay at home parent devoted that amount of time to paid employment rather than cooking? Well, if these figures were accurate and that food prep time was that valuable you could hire that median full-time chef at their median wage and still have $12,000/year to buy groceries - probably enough to feed that hypothetical family all year.

Seem reasonable? I think not. It's one thing to claim that stay at home parents are valuable - which I'd agree with - but these studies always seem highly distorted.