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When considering personal injury compensation and the award of damages, gender issues can play an important role. In Canada recently, a female judge made history in the province of Ontario by recognising that a woman who had lost the ability to do housework should be awarded a portion of damages specifically for lost housekeeping capacity.
The woman, who had been injured in a car accident in 2000, had been proclaimed by her family as a "clean freak" before the accident left her unable to return to full time work and needing the help of others to clean her house.
Her personal injury solicitor suggested that the presiding judge saw the issue as a feminist one.
He said, "Although anyone could lose housekeeping capacity as a result of injuries, in our society traditionally women have fulfilled that role. Our courts have traditionally recognised that if somebody loses the ability to work, that's worthy of compensation. Now people who work in the home are entitled to the same consideration."
Insurers for the driver of the car, who admitted liability for the accident, argued that the woman had suffered no pecuniary loss as her friends and family had taken on the housekeeping duties free of charge and that the award for future loss was erroneous as there had been no evidence that the woman planned to hire a cleaner.
On awarding $59,935 CAD for loss of housekeeping capacity, over and above the general damages and loss of earnings award of $510,000 CAD, the judge's ruling judgement, endorsed by two male judges, noted that losing the ability to do housework amounted to a loss of identity for the plaintiff. She suggested that just as the inability to perform an income-earning job would adversely affect someone who had previously been the main ‘bread-winner', so, the plaintiff's sense of identity had been adversely affected by her inability to maintain her home to the standard she had before the accident.
On searching the internet it appears that certain Australian court rulings, as well as rulings in other Canadian provinces, have recognised the effects of "loss of capacity to do housework" as compensable, but in the 1980s there were several rulings that treated housework as voluntary, citing that compensation for the loss of ability to carry out voluntary work with the measurable economic value of a damages award was not necessary.
Graycar and Morgan suggest in their book, The Hidden Gender of Law, that the material effect of labelling domestic work as non-economic has deprived women of substantial amounts of compensation and this depiction of the loss as non-economic in principle denies recognition to women's work in the home as economic in nature, thus resulting in the fundamental undervaluation of women's loss of domestic working capacity.
After a cursory search of UK web pages it appears that loss of capacity to do housework in UK personal injury compensation awards generally appears under the guise of general damages and future costs when it is deemed that expense will be incurred by the plaintiff in order to maintain a certain lifestyle that was enjoyed before the injury occurred. However, awards do not appear to be common in terms of an economic valuation of the role of housekeeping within UK family life or the damage to the identity of the accident victim when they are no longer able to fulfil their former role.
