Women and work post-crash.

By Dawn Foster

The value of women’s unpaid and undervalued work is slowly beginning to be appreciated: the time is right for a re-examination of who gets paid, how much, and for what.

The idea of the Economic Man forms the cornerstone of orthodox economic thought, Katrine Marcal, a Swedish journalist, argues in her newly translated book – Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?

The bulk of women’s work: caring, cleaning, child-rearing is excluded from the idea of the economic man, who acts out of rational self interest, and must then be incentivised to work through monetary remuneration.