"Free" from 19 November: the pay gap is no choice at all

According to franceinfo, the feminist organisation Les Glorieuses calculates that women will be working "for free" from 19 November. The reasoning: if they were paid the same average hourly rate as men, they would by that date have earned what they currently earn over the whole year. The material available to us does not detail the method or the pay-gap percentage used; we will not invent it.

What follows is our reading, not the organisation's.

We always hear the same tune: women supposedly choose lower-paid jobs, part-time work, broken-up careers. As if, every morning, millions of people drew straws to decide who will pick the children up from school. A "choice" made in a kitchen where the fridge is half empty, where the nursery has no places and where the grandmother needs help, looks much more like a constraint.

This is where the concept of social reproduction becomes useful, and it is simple to explain. Capitalism needs work that produces people rather than goods: minding children, cooking, caring, teaching, cleaning, looking after the elderly. This work is largely unpaid or badly paid, overwhelmingly done by women, and filed away outside "the economy". Yet without it, no factory would open on Monday morning. On 19 November, in our view, it does not measure merely a payslip injustice: it exposes the bill of a system that relies on this work without paying it its value.

The cycle is vicious. Because these tasks are devalued at home, the jobs that extend them (home help, care, early-years childcare, schools) are devalued in the labour market too. And when the state cuts health, housing or childcare, the work does not disappear: it falls back on households, and in practice on women. Austerity also means one more double shift.

Angela Davis pointed out that domestic labour is a historical construction, not a female destiny: for her, it could become a social matter rather than the private responsibility of each woman. That idea is unsettling, because it presupposes spending public money and socialising what people would rather keep in the shadows.

What do you do with a symbolic date? It is not enough, and a calendar does not pay a salary. Trade unions fight over the price of labour, which is necessary: pay scales, involuntary part-time work, revaluing care jobs. But the gap that Les Glorieuses measures also originates upstream, in the distribution of invisible work and in the collective services that are lacking. As long as we look only at the bottom line of the payslip, we will be treating the symptom.

One thing is certain: on 19 November, someone will already have done the washing up.