When Polly Creed, a Londoner, read a filmmaker's comment that "if your mum can do it, it doesn't have value," she felt something shift—a frustration that such a sentiment could still appear in a national newspaper in an era when we believe we've made real progress against everyday sexism. The phrase stuck with her not because it was shocking, but because it was so utterly, demonstrably false—and because it revealed something we still haven't reckoned with about how we measure human worth.
The work mothers do has profound value. Some are doctors, artists, scientists, lawyers, cleaners, social workers, and teachers—their paid labour shapes society in countless visible ways. But the real conversation Creed wanted to start was about the other work, the labour that rarely appears on a paycheck: the unpaid domestic work that holds up everything—the bedrock of our households, our communities, and our economy.
The numbers tell a story we should be uncomfortable ignoring. According to a 2016 Office for National Statistics report, women perform more than 60% more unpaid labour than men. That unpaid work—the caring for elderly relatives, the nappy changes, the kisses on bruised knees, the cooking and cleaning and emotional labour that disproportionately falls to women—has been valued at £1.01 trillion. To put that in perspective, that's equivalent to roughly 56% of the entire UK gross domestic product. It's not an invisible contribution. It's an enormous one we've simply chosen not to see.
What Creed found particularly galling was that the filmmaker was making a broader argument about what makes us human in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. He was calling for us to connect with each other, to resist the dehumanizing pull of AI and the dystopian futures it might bring. His rallying cry was meant to challenge sloppy, mindless thinking. Yet in the same breath, he'd articulated a sentiment that is perhaps the sloppiest thinking of all—one that diminishes the very work that might be our clearest distinction from machines.
Because here's the thing about artificial intelligence: it is relentless at optimizing tasks, at performing functions more efficiently than humans ever could. But the work that defines our humanity—the caring, the nurturing, the loving—seems least imperilled by automation. That's precisely the work that machines cannot do. And it's the work that continues to fall, more often than not, to women.
There's an irony worth sitting with. If the AI revolution forces us to finally reckon with what we truly value, perhaps it could be the catalyst for change. Perhaps we might begin to understand that unpaid labour has value not because it contributes to GDP or serves economic function, but because it is fundamentally human work. Perhaps we might recognize that a mother's labour—whether in a career or at home, or in the countless overlaps between—defines what it means to be human in ways that no algorithm ever will. That recognition, Creed suggests, would be a genuine measure of progress.