The Moment Society Decided What to Count, and Who Stopped Counting

At university. I started noticing the way women talked about maths as something incredibly difficult, something outside their preferences. I've always been a mathematical person, with a strong envy towards artistic minds actually, and I couldn't understand why maths was considered so hard.

But the real insight came later, when I started understanding economic history. In the contemporary world, STEM fields are considered fundamental to growth, development, and every achievement of society. That's correct. But it all arises from a value system that puts economic income above wellbeing.

Since the 1700s, scientific thought revolutionised our world, and economic theory, which was originally a social science concerned with wellbeing and how people approached livelihoods, followed the trend. Economists started looking for mathematical formulas to explain human behaviour. And it turned out to be much easier to measure aspects of human life that were traded and priced. Everything that had a market price was easy to value. Everything that didn't was ignored.

Men left the house and went to another physical place to exchange their work in the market. Most women remained inside the home providing work without exchanging it for a price. And from that point, every activity outside the house became more important than every activity inside the house.

Exactly. Before the industrial revolution, most families were dedicated to subsistence. Almost all goods and services needed to survive were produced in the household. Food was planted, preserved, cooked and transformed at home. Homes were built by hand with the support of the community. Clothes and all textiles were made at home.

Women and men shared the work for the survival of the family and the community. But when work outside the home started being paid while work inside the home did not, work outside started being "counted." Work inside did not.

The moment society decided what to count and what not is the moment society decided what to value and what to ignore. So building walls became an important profession and you needed mathematical training to do it. Making jumpers remained a service done for free, and everyone forgot to mention that you need incredible mathematical abilities to make a jumper, not less than to make a simple wall.

As a man, you were taught basic maths. As a woman, you were told you'd never really use it.

Take a crochet doily. To make a flat, circular textile doily, a crafter must strictly follow the rules of Euclidean geometry. The circumference is C = 2πr, so the number of stitches in each consecutive row must increase proportionally to keep the fabric flat. For basic solid stitches, a flat circle requires adding a fixed number of stitches per round, typically 12 per round. That creates an arithmetic progression: Row 1 = 12, Row 2 = 24, Row 3 = 36.

If you tell the woman making it that she's using Euclidean and hyperbolic geometry, she'll tell you: "No way, I'm a woman."

Here is where the deceit started. Women were convinced they could not count, so their work stopped counting.

And it goes beyond textiles. What chemical abilities do you need to make sure a cake rises? That bread is ready? That food is conserved and not poisonous? That oil is extracted properly? Women did these things for centuries. Are you sure that needs less maths than building a basic wall?

The Italian family structure is still very much a structure that was functional in the industrial and pre-industrial era. Women do most domestic work and take care of children and the elderly, while men are "breadwinners."

The system works efficiently from an economic perspective. The fundamental organisation that supports the society is the family, where most goods and services are produced, freeing time so individuals can enter the market and sell their labour. But since the division of domestic labour became almost entirely women's responsibility and 0% men's, men freed their time to sell their work at a price and started receiving money for it. They became the person who controlled the money coming into the house.

In most families, the management of expenses was controlled by women. So if everything worked perfectly (love, respect, happiness) this was never an issue. But here's the problem: if the man goes out for a certain number of hours and comes home with a salary that you can count, while the woman remains home and works the same hours but never counts her contribution and never claims a clear proportion of that salary as hers, the deceit is ready.

He earns. She does not. That is the biggest lie of our times.

He gets a salary and opens a bank account. She doesn't control the bank account totally and independently. The banker calls him. It's his money. When you ask for a loan, you go with him. It was his money. Things have changed in the last century, but it is not as easy as we think.

More than "we are bad at maths," what stops us from acting differently is that we count less. Things are changing really fast, but I think one of the big mistakes we make as feminists is continuing to reinforce the importance of the man's role. We need to transform the way we see the traditional roles of women. Take away the lie that women's work cannot be counted. Start counting what we do.

We cooked for thousands of years. Are you sure I cannot create a new acid? We need to count what has not been counted, so we can look at what we traditionally do with different eyes. Be strong with what is feminine while not pretending it is exclusively ours, but saying it out loud: it is important too.

Here's an example that drives me crazy. Look at how families give pocket money. Boys typically get paid for tasks: washing the car, fixing something, changing light bulbs. Girls tend to do daily activities that are considered free: cleaning, cooking, making sure everyone is at football practice on time.

If while you are growing up most of the activities you do are considered free, it is hard later to move to a mentality where you ask for money for your work.

Teach maths with crochet. Teach proportions with cooking. Teach geometry with tailor modelling. Everything will change.

Every maths book has completely removed any feminine analogy. Look at the problems in elementary school textbooks. If you reintroduce them, both boys and girls will go home and look at the food their mother made with a completely different perspective.

I'm very happy that Lego for girls exists. It helps brain development. But why are we not seeing knitting sets for boys? Who decided that knitting is less good for brain development than building blocks? The fact that what men traditionally did is considered more important than what women traditionally did is the real problem.

The raising importance of science and measurement of facts was a great achievement of our history. Economic theory has fully embraced this with the use of maths and statistics to explain the world. Now it is time to start counting what has been ignored for too long, and create a system that values all aspects of human life, not just what is done for the market.