What Are Women Actually Worth?
Science has an answer. History has a receipt. It’s time to invoice.
It was Thanksgiving. So I had the rare occasion to see my sister, radiant and round with her first pregnancy, and somewhere between the 2nd serving of walnut cranberry and the conversation, she turned to her husband and said the most reasonable thing in the world.
She said: “We need a postnuptial agreement.”
She didn’t say it with anger. She said it the way you’d say “we need to check the tire pressure” — practically, calmly, because she could see something he couldn’t quite yet.
Perhaps, in her newfound condition, she could see that she was taking on enormous risk. Physical risk. Financial risk. The risk of permanently altering her body, her career trajectory, her negotiating power in the world. And she wanted, quite reasonably, to be acknowledged for it.
His non-answer, I suspect, was not cruelty. Perhaps, it was a failure of imagination — the same failure that has kept women underpaid, under-protected, and under-compensated for millennia. He simply had not been asked to do the math before.
So let’s do the math.
I. THE OLDEST LABOR DISPUTE IN HISTORY
Long before the gender pay gap had a name, it had a structure.
In ancient Rome, women were classified under the legal doctrine of patria potestas — the power of the father — meaning they were, in the eyes of the state, property before they were people.
A Roman woman’s labor, her reproductive capacity, her domestic management of a household — the shopping, the accounting, the raising of children who would become citizens and soldiers — none of it belonged to her. It belonged to the paterfamilias. The man at the head of the table.
This was not merely cultural custom. It was codified law. And what Rome codified, the Western world inherited.
The Roman philosopher Cicero wrote extensively about justice and the proper ordering of society. He was, in many respects, a man of remarkable moral sophistication. He also owned slaves and considered women legally incompetent to manage their own affairs.
These two facts coexisted without apparent contradiction, because the system was designed to make exploitation invisible — to reframe labor extraction (both from slaves and women) as natural order.
Sound familiar?
Centuries later, the structure shifted in form but not in function. By the medieval period, the dowry system formalized what Rome had practiced informally: a woman’s value was transactional. Her family paid a man to take her. Not for her intelligence, not for her labor, not for the staggering biological cost of bearing his children. She was an asset being transferred between men, with a price tag attached — and it was her family, not her, who collected.
We tell ourselves we have moved past this. We have moved past the paperwork, perhaps. The spirit of it remains remarkably intact.
“We tell ourselves we have moved past this. We have moved past the paperwork, perhaps. The spirit of it remains remarkably intact.”
II. WHAT SCIENCE HAS CONFIRMED (AND THE ECONOMY IGNORES)
Here is what we know. A meta-analysis examining data across 99 studies and over 95,000 individuals found that women consistently outperform men in key leadership competencies — including taking initiative, driving results, displaying integrity, and developing others. Women score higher in 17 of 19 leadership effectiveness categories.¹
This is not a fringe finding. McKinsey & Company’s Women in the Workplace report — the largest study of women in corporate America, surveying over 270 companies and 270,000 employees — found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams are 39% more likely to achieve above-average profitability than their less diverse peers.²
And yet.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women in management occupations earn, on average, 84 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts.
Yes, still.
For women of color, that gap widens considerably — Black women in management earn approximately 68 cents, Latinas approximately 62 cents.³
Meaning, myself included.
We are better, on average, at the job. We are paid less to do it. There is no intellectually honest explanation for this that doesn’t involve the word “bias.”
A few years ago, I read Caroline Criado Perez’s groundbreaking book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, which documents how this gap is not accidental — it is architectural. Our entire economic system, from urban planning (i.e. how we get to work) to pharmaceutical trials to the design of office thermostats, was built around a default male body and a default male life.
Not because men are malicious and they all congregated in a boardroom to decide how to thwart women, but rather because they were designing under the false premise that “women are just little men” — or because empathy for the other sex isn’t taught, nor valued.
Women’s needs, women’s labor, women’s biological realities were simply not entered into the data. What isn’t measured cannot be valued. What isn’t valued cannot be compensated.⁴
Louder for the people in the back of the room: “What isn’t valued, cannot be compensated!”
The gap, in other words, is a design feature. Not a bug.
III. ON CALL AND UNCOMPENSATED: THE WORKPLACE’S HIDDEN DEBT
Before we even get to the home, I want to name something that happens at the office — because it is so normalized that most women don’t even register it as exploitation anymore.
I know an Australian woman, let’s call her Leah, — brilliant, competent, indispensable — who works as a personal assistant to a high-level executive at a major company. Part of her unofficial job description involves being available on weekends. If his family has an emergency, she is expected to handle it. If something goes wrong on a Saturday night at 3am, her phone rings. She is, in every practical sense, on call 24/7.
She is not compensated for this.
Consider that security guards in most states are now legally required to receive on-call pay — even when they are sitting at home, even when no incident occurs, even when they are simply required to be available. The law recognizes that requiring someone to hold their time in reserve for your needs is itself a form of labor that deserves remuneration.
No such protection reliably extends to personal assistants, executive support staff, or the vast army of women who manage the professional and personal lives of powerful men. Their availability is assumed. Their compensation reflects only the hours they are physically present — not the hours they are mentally tethered, phone nearby, waiting.
This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern. And it is worth naming because the line between what women owe at work and what women owe at home is, for many of us, not a line at all. It is a continuum of invisible, uncompensated availability.
IV. THE INVISIBLE INFRASTRUCTURE
Now let’s talk about the home — because that is where the accounting gets truly staggering.
Who in your household remembers that your nephew’s birthday is next Thursday? Who researches pediatricians, keeps track of which friend is going through a divorce and needs a check-in, plans the holiday meals, orders the Christmas and birthday gifts, schedules the dentist appointments, and notices when you’re almost out of olive oil?
This is called the mental load, and research from sociologists at the University of Michigan found that women perform an average of 2.5 more hours of unpaid domestic labor per day than men — even in dual-income households.⁵ If you were to pay a woman market rate for the services she performs as a household manager, primary caregiver, emotional support provider, and domestic logistics coordinator, economists at Salary.com have estimated the annual value at over $178,000 per year.⁶
One hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars. Per year. Unpaid.
But it’s not just the big things. It is also… the toilet paper.
My mother has taken to calling herself the Toilet Paper Fairy. Not because it’s a glamorous title — but because no matter who empties the roll, she is always the one who replaces it. My stepfather Gil, lord bless him, can use the last square and walk away without a second thought. My mother notices, calculates, retrieves. This happens so automatically, so invisibly, that it barely registers as a task. Which is precisely the point. The mental load is not just about what women do — it is about what women notice, track, anticipate, and resolve before anyone else even perceives a problem.
Multiply the toilet paper across every room of a house, every relationship, every year of a marriage, and you begin to understand what we are actually talking about. This is not nagging. This is not being controlling. This is being the operational backbone of a household that would quietly collapse without you — and receiving precisely zero acknowledgment on your tax return for doing it.
“The mental load is not just about what women do — it is about what women notice, track, anticipate, and resolve before anyone else even perceives a problem.”
V. THE BIOLOGICAL DEBT
Pregnancy is the most physically demanding labor a human body can perform. During gestation, a woman’s blood volume increases by up to 50%. Her organs shift to accommodate a growing life. Calcium is leached from her bones to build a skeleton that is not hers. Her immune system undergoes a fundamental restructuring. Her brain, according to a landmark study in Nature Neuroscience, undergoes measurable gray matter changes that persist for at least two years postpartum.⁷
The risks are not abstract. According to the CDC, approximately 700 women die in the United States each year from pregnancy-related complications. For Black women, the maternal mortality rate is nearly three times higher than for white women.⁸ For every death, the CDC estimates 70 women experience severe maternal morbidity — life-threatening complications or end-organ damage.
A lineman who climbs 200 feet in the air to fix a telephone line is compensated for his risk. It is built into his wage structure. It is acknowledged by his union, his employer, and his government. A woman who risks her life, her bone density, her cardiovascular health, her brain chemistry, and her career trajectory to carry the next generation — she is thanked. Maybe. And then sent home with a hospital bill.
This is not a biological complaint. I am in awe of what the female body can do. What I am naming is a systemic failure to acknowledge that awe with anything resembling material compensation.
VI. THE SAFETY CALCULUS
There is another risk that rarely makes it into the economic conversation because it is too uncomfortable to say plainly. So I will say it plainly.
According to the Violence Policy Center, a woman is far more likely to be killed by an intimate partner — a husband, a boyfriend, a man she loved and trusted — than by a stranger. In 2021, of all female homicide victims in the United States, 34% were killed by an intimate partner. By contrast, only 6% of male homicide victims were killed by an intimate partner.⁹
But I don’t need a statistic to make this real. Let me tell you about a conversation I had while traveling through Bali.
I met a Spanish surfer — charming, self-aware, the kind of man who thinks out loud in a way that’s disarming. He was telling me about how he sometimes goes home with women he’s just met. He loves that freedom, he said. But then his expression shifted. As a man who thinks about having children one day, he said he genuinely disapproves of women who do the same — not out of judgment, but out of something closer to fear on their behalf.
“I know it’s strange,” he told me, “because even though I benefit from these women being trusting, they take such a big risk taking an unknown man home with them.”
He paused. Then he said it plainly: “I could easily just snap their neck. And then their life would be over.”
He wasn’t threatening anyone. He was being honest about a reality that most men never say out loud — and most women try not to think about too hard. After these encounters, he told me, he finds himself saying to them: “You really shouldn’t do this.”
I found that equal parts funny and gutting. Here was a man who benefited from women’s trust, who simultaneously understood how catastrophically misplaced that trust could be — and who felt compelled to warn them after the fact, like a smoke detector that goes off once the house is already burning.
He was not a bad man. That’s the whole point. Even the good ones understand the asymmetry of risk that women absorb simply by existing in proximity to men. The question is what we do with that understanding.
A woman who enters a marriage is not being paranoid when she calculates risk. She is being rational. She is taking on a statistically significant physical vulnerability. She is becoming, in most cases, financially enmeshed with someone who is on average larger, stronger, and in possession of greater social and economic power. She is often — especially with children — reducing her own economic independence and marketability in the process.
Risk demands compensation. This is not a radical concept. It is the foundational logic of every insurance policy, every hazard pay agreement, every actuarial table ever written. We compensate people for risk all the time. We simply do not extend that logic to the risks women absorb by virtue of being women in intimate partnership with men.
My sister asking for a postnuptial agreement at Thanksgiving was not a radical act. It was the most reasonable thing in the world. It was a woman doing the math that the system has trained everyone around her to avoid.
VII. THE BENEFIT ASYMMETRY
Here is perhaps the most clarifying data point of all — and the one that tends to make people the most uncomfortable.
Marriage, by virtually every measurable metric, benefits men more than women. Married men live longer, earn more, report higher happiness, and experience better physical and mental health than their unmarried counterparts. A 2019 analysis in PLOS Medicine found that married men had a 15% lower risk of premature death than unmarried men.¹⁰
For women, the picture reverses. Married women, compared to their unmarried peers, show lower rates of career advancement, higher rates of depression, greater incidence of anxiety, and in many studies, no statistically significant mortality benefit. Sociologist Jessie Bernard identified this divergence decades ago, famously noting that every marriage contains two marriages — his and hers — and his is better.
If you want to know more about the Marriage Benefit Imbalance, Elizabeth Gilbert has a quick video.
We are not entering the same contract. We are entering a contract where he receives and she provides. Where he benefits and she subsidizes. And we are doing this without negotiation, without acknowledgment, and for most women, without so much as a conversation about what a fair exchange might look like.
The patriarchy has been extraordinarily skilled at convincing women that asking for fairness is unromantic. That love means giving without expectation of return. That a good woman doesn’t count the cost.
But a good businesswoman does. And you are allowed to be both.
VIII. WHAT THE INVOICE LOOKS LIKE — AND HOW TO HAND IT OVER
I am not here to tell you that marriage is a bad investment, or that men are your adversaries. I know extraordinary men. I have loved them. I do business with them. I have been shaped by the good ones in ways I am still discovering.
Heck, the reason I have the audacity to know my own worth and never accept anything less is because father-figures instilled this audacity within me throughout my childhood!
I believe in the beauty of partnership, built consciously, with open eyes and honest accounting on both sides.
I am here to tell you that the most loving thing you can do — for yourself, for your partner, and for the relationship, family, and career you are building — is to be honest about what you’re each bringing to the table, and to negotiate accordingly.
What does fair compensation look like? It is different for every woman and every partnership. But at minimum, consider these as your starting point:
A spousal retirement contribution. If you are reducing your earning potential to manage a household, raise children, or support his career, you are making a financial sacrifice that should be reflected in your long-term security. A contribution to your IRA each year is not a gift. It is a dividend.
Recognition AND Compensation of domestic labor. Whether that is a formal stipend, a joint account with equal discretionary funds, or a clear and equitable division of labor that doesn’t place the invisible management cost on one partner — it must be named and agreed upon. Her money is her money. Their money is their money. Full stop.
Legal protection proportional to your risk. A prenuptial or postnuptial agreement that reflects the biological, physical, and economic risk you are absorbing. Not as a threat. As an acknowledgment. As evidence that he sees you clearly.
Now — and this is the part that most women’s empowerment writing skips — let me give you the actual words.
Because knowing you deserve something and knowing how to ask for it are two entirely different skills. Here are scripts you can use, in the workplace and at home, to begin the negotiation:
In a salary negotiation or performance review:
“I’ve researched market compensation for this role, and I want to make sure we’re aligned. Based on the scope of my responsibilities and the results I’ve delivered — specifically [insert two measurable wins] — I’d like to discuss bringing my salary to [specific number]. What would need to be true for us to make that happen?”
When advocating for on-call or after-hours compensation:
“I want to flag something I believe deserves a conversation. Part of my role requires me to be available outside standard hours — and I’ve been happy to show up that way. I’d like to discuss how we can formally recognize that availability, whether through adjusted compensation, comp time, or another structure that feels fair to both of us.”
When initiating a postnuptial or financial equity conversation with a partner:
“I feel so excited about what we’re building together and what we each bring to it. I want to make sure that as things shift, especially [with the baby / as my role at home grows], that we have a structure that protects both of us and honors what each of us is contributing. Can we set aside time to talk through what that looks like?”
When negotiating domestic labor equity at home:
“I want to talk about how we divide things, because I’ve realized I’m carrying more of the invisible stuff — the remembering, the planning, the noticing — than I think either of us intended. I’m not saying this to assign blame. I’m saying it because I think we can do better, and I want us to figure that out together.”
If the men in your life resist these conversations, I want to offer you a reframe that I have seen work: find the man in your life who loves you — your father, your brother, your uncle, a trusted mentor — and ask him to be your voice in rooms where only men seem to be listening. Not because your voice isn’t enough. Because sometimes patriarchal systems only hear what they are designed to hear.
P.S. — If you want to go deeper on exactly what to say to men so they actually listen — rooted in neuroscience, not guesswork — my book How to Make Him Chase You breaks it all down. Many men have loved it so much they’ve gifted it to every woman they know. Because a man who truly sees you will want the women in his life to see themselves clearly too.
IX. A NOTE TO THE MEN
If you have read this far, I want to speak to you directly.
You already know most of this! You know it. It’s why you LOVE US. It’s why you want us. You, my good sir, know that a good woman is worth the world. It’s why you go to war for us, it why you devote yourselves to us. It’s why you worship us, make the greatest works of art in our honor through painting and sculptures. We women make the world beautiful. After all the money, awards, accolades, cars, and fun, you know that a woman and potentially a family gives you purpose, gives your life the deepest meaning.
There’s a questionnaire that captures this truth more starkly than any love poem ever could. When researchers asked men, “What would you do if all women disappeared from the earth?” — the answers were devastating in their honesty. Men said they “wouldn’t want to live.” That it would be awful. That existence without women would feel pointless. Women, asked the same question, had very different answers: they’d go jogging with their music all the way up. They’d swim naked in the ocean. They’d feel, for the first time, completely free.
That asymmetry is worth sitting with for a moment. Women imagined liberation. Men imagined the end of meaning.
And isn’t that exactly what we’ve been saying this whole time? You need us — not just to cook the dinner and raise the children and manage the calendar — but to make the world worth being in.
My friend Gabby once asked her fiancé something that stopped him in his tracks. They were in Bali, and the men were talking about loving to come back to bali where beautiful women wear bikinis or tops without bras while riding around town on their scooters. She looked at him and said: “Do you feel the same way when you always get back to bali?”
He thought about it. Then he said: “Yeah. It puts a smile on my face to see women free and beauty everywhere.”
She reminded him: “It’s like that here in Bali for women because we feel safe enough here to not have to hide our bodies. We’re not afraid. And that freedom — that embodied, joyful, fearless femininity — that’s what you’re actually smiling at.”
Woman make the world more beautiful. We make it softer. We make it worth fighting for, worth building for, worth coming home to. The greatest paintings in the Louvre, the most enduring sculptures in Rome, the most immortal love poems in the Western canon — they were made by men, for women, because we inspired something in them that nothing else could.
So no, this is not a war. This is a renegotiation. Between people who need each other. Between people who make each other’s lives immeasurably richer. The least we can ask — and the least you can offer — is to see that clearly, and compensate accordingly.
This essay is not an indictment. It is a beautiful invitation. Most of the men I respect most in my life were not born knowing how to see women’s labor — they were taught to see it, by men and women who loved them enough to tell the truth, and by their own willingness to listen.
There are men who already live in this awareness — and they are some of the finest people I know. They are the ones who add to their wife’s IRA each year without being asked. Who understand that her money is her money, and the household money is shared money. Who laughs at the viral trend when the wife comes to her husband saying “I can’t pay the rent,” knowing full well he’s always covered all household needs. Who has looked at their marriages with clear eyes and asked, “Is this actually equitable?” — and then done something about the answer.
They are the executives and business owners who recognize that many of their best employees are also holding up entire households. Who offer flexibility — the ability to leave at 3pm to pick up a sick child, to take an unexpected afternoon when a family situation demands it — not as a favor, but as a baseline recognition that humans have lives, and that women, disproportionately, are the ones managing the infrastructure of those lives. I have a mentor, Brent, who runs his company this way. His team is loyal, productive, and exceptional. This is not a coincidence.
They are the men who, when they hear a woman on their team is being paid less than her male counterpart, do not say “that’s HR’s problem.” They say: “Let’s fix this.”
If you are in the gray zone — if you have never thought about this, if you were raised in a home where your mother did everything and your father’s work was considered the “real” contribution — I am not here to shame you. I am here to extend you an invitation to be better. Not because feminism demands it. Because the women in your life deserve it. Because your daughters are watching. Because the kind of man who sees, acknowledges, and compensates the women around him is the kind of man who is genuinely, measurably, undeniably good.
And good men know: that is worth becoming.
“The kind of man who sees, acknowledges, and compensates the women around him is the kind of man who is genuinely, measurably, undeniably good.”
X. WHAT WE ARE REALLY ASKING
We are not asking to be loved less wildly. We are not asking for romance to be replaced with contracts and spreadsheets. We are not declaring war on men or on marriage or on the beauty of building a life with someone who chooses you every day.
We are asking to be seen.
We are asking for our labor — in the boardroom and in the bedroom, on call at 3am and in the Thanksgiving kitchen, in the years of invisible emotional scaffolding that hold families and communities and the entire civilized world together — to be acknowledged as the extraordinary, quantifiable, irreplaceable contribution that it is.
Hera, queen of the Greek gods, was goddess of marriage — and she was, in almost every myth, betrayed by it. Demeter, goddess of the harvest and sustenance, had to withhold her labor from the world before anyone noticed what they had taken for granted. Persephone was taken, bargained over, and split between two worlds without ever being asked what she wanted.
These stories are not old. They are happening in offices and nurseries and courtrooms right now.
But here is what else those stories contain: women who were not broken by what was taken from them. Women who found their leverage. Women who negotiated their return.
History has a receipt, and it is long.
Science has done the accounting.
The only question that remains is whether you are ready and rooted enough in your worth to hand over the invoice.
With love always,
— Amanda
Sources & Citations
1. Paustian-Underdahl, S.C., Walker, L.S., & Woehr, D.J. (2014). Gender and perceptions of leadership effectiveness: A meta-analysis of contextual moderators. Journal of Applied Psychology. See also: Zenger, J. & Folkman, J. (2019). Research: Women Score Higher Than Men in Most Leadership Skills. Harvard Business Review.
2. McKinsey & Company / LeanIn.Org. (2023). Women in the Workplace 2023.
3. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2023). Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2022. BLS Reports.
4. Criado Perez, C. (2019). Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Abrams Press.
5. Sayer, L.C. (2005). Gender, Time and Inequality: Trends in Women’s and Men’s Paid Work, Unpaid Work and Free Time. Social Forces, 84(1), 285–303.
6. Salary.com. (2023). Mom’s Work: What Is a Mother Worth? Annual survey of compensable household labor.
7. Hoekzema, E. et al. (2017). Pregnancy leads to long-lasting changes in human brain structure. Nature Neuroscience, 20, 287–296.
8. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023). Maternal Mortality Rates in the United States, 2021.
9. Violence Policy Center. (2023). When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 2021 Homicide Data.
10. Rendall, M.S., et al. (2011). The protective effect of marriage for survival: A review and update. Demography.
