Caroline Criado Perez

Failing to account for female socialisation can also lead to women living for decades with undiagnosed behavioural disorders. For years we have thought that autism is four times more common in boys than in girls, and that when girls have it, they are more seriously affected.45 But new research suggests that in fact female socialisation may help girls mask their symptoms better than boys and that there are far more girls living with autism than we previously realised.46

We like to think that the unpaid work women do is just about individual women caring for their individual family members to their own individual benefit. It isn’t. Women’s unpaid work is work that society depends on, and it is work from which society as a whole benefits.

But there was one major aspect of production that was excluded from what came to be the ‘international convention about how you think about and measure the economy’, and that was the contribution of unpaid household work, like cooking, cleaning and childcare. ‘Everyone acknowledges that there is economic value in that work, it’s just not part of ‘the economy’,’ says Coyle.