The invisible labor economy

23 hours a week of invisible work

Kelly Hubbell, a tech sales worker raising two children, tracked everything she did to keep her house running. The total came to 23 hours a week, mostly mental planning rather than chores themselves.

“I just thought, wouldn't it be awesome if I could clone myself?”

She hired a house manager

Hubbell found someone to take over the logistics and errands she had been cramming into evenings and weekends. The relief from handing off tasks inspired her to build a business around it.

“It completely changed my life. Overnight, I felt like I could be a present parent.”

Sage Haus launches in 2023

During her third maternity leave, Hubbell founded Sage Haus, a white-glove service helping parents hire house managers and set up home-management systems.The timing coincided with women holding more U.S.

What a house manager actually does

A house manager takes ownership of household tasks, making decisions without asking. A babysitter buying shoes for an outgrown child would overstep; for a house manager, that is the job.

The cost of outsourcing household work

Sage Haus families typically pay house managers twenty-five to forty-five dollars an hour for fifteen to twenty hours a week, roughly twenty thousand to forty-seven thousand dollars a year.

Mothers do most of the mental load

A 2024 study by researchers at the University of Bath and the University of Melbourne found mothers handle 71 percent of household mental-load tasks, the cognitive work of planning meals and arranging activities.

Normalizing paid household work

Hubbell quit her job in 2024 to run Sage Haus full time.The company now has more than 60 employees and works with about 100 families a month across the U.S.

“We are putting a value on what has historically been invisible labor on the backs of mostly women.”

Unpaid household work worth trillions

In 2020, Oxfam estimated unpaid care work by women and girls worldwide is worth at least 10.8 trillion dollars a year.In the U.S.