Challenges in Counting Women’s Work: From Household to Economy

Walk through any Indian neighbourhood at six in the morning and you will see women fetching water, milking cattle, kneading dough, sweeping courtyards, prepping vegetables for a roadside stall, and getting children ready for school. Yet when the official statistics arrive, most of these women are listed as “not working.” This gap between what women actually do and what gets counted is one of the oldest puzzles in development economics, and it has shaped everything from welfare schemes to GDP figures for decades.

Why women’s work goes uncounted
The informal sector blind spot
Social norms that shape the answer
The role of surveys and censuses
The PLFS and its limits
Why this matters for policy and the economy
The care economy puzzle
Efforts to count better
India’s Time Use Surveys
Other reforms quietly happening
What still needs to change

Why women’s work goes uncounted

The enumeration problem is not a small clerical error. It is a structural feature of how economies have historically defined “work.” The System of National Accounts, the global rulebook for measuring GDP, draws a sharp boundary: activities that produce goods and services for the market are economic, while most activities done inside the home for one’s own family are not. Since Indian women perform the bulk of cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, elder care, fetching water, and collecting fuel, a huge portion of their daily labour falls on the “non-economic” side of this line by definition.

Even the work women do that should clearly count often slips through. Development economist Bina Agarwal has long argued that biases in definitions of work and in reporting by typically male enumerators and male respondents lead to many hardworking women being labelled as housewives. A woman who tends the family’s cattle, helps in the paddy field, runs a tailoring business from her veranda, or sorts grain for sale is often reported as someone who “just does household duties” because that is how the household, or the enumerator, perceives her primary role.

Most working Indian women are not in factories or offices. They are in agriculture, domestic service, home-based piece-rate work, street vending, and small artisanal production, sectors where employment is irregular, undocumented, and tucked inside family enterprises. Estimates have long suggested that over 90 percent of working women in India operate in the informal sector, and even though such jobs are supposed to be recorded, undercounting is the norm rather than the exception.

There is also a powerful cultural filter. In many households, admitting that a woman “works” carries stigma, especially in communities where female employment is seen as a sign that the family cannot support itself. When an enumerator asks the head of the household what each member does, the default answer for adult women becomes “housework,” even when she is selling milk, stitching garments, or labouring on the family field. This single-question, single-respondent design has been one of the most criticised features of Indian data collection.

The role of surveys and censuses

Two big statistical machines historically measure work in India: the decennial Census and the surveys run by the National Sample Survey Office, now consolidated under the annual Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS). Both have struggled with women’s work, although in different ways.

The Census, conducted by the Office of the Registrar General, collects information on economic activity through a single household respondent who answers on behalf of every member. During population enumeration, each person’s economic activity is recorded along with age, marital status, education, and other details, but this proxy reporting introduces exactly the kind of bias that erases women’s contributions. A husband or father-in-law deciding whether his wife is a “worker” rarely captures her productive hours accurately.

Definitions have also shifted over time. Older censuses used narrow definitions tied to “main work” performed for the major part of the year, which automatically excluded women whose labour was seasonal or distributed across many small tasks. Researchers studying rural employment between 1961 and 1983 found that conceptual, definitional and operational problems in censuses and NSS rounds systematically under-enumerated female workers, and that the supposed decline in female participation across decades was partly an artefact of changing definitions rather than a real fall in women’s labour.

The PLFS and its limits

The PLFS, India’s main labour market survey, is better designed than the Census in some ways. It uses trained enumerators and a more detailed schedule. But it still classifies people by their “primary” status, which forces a binary choice for women whose lives are anything but binary. A 2025 analysis in the Economic and Political Weekly points out that the PLFS category of “domestic worker” stops at classifying someone’s primary labour status without probing further, even though such women routinely produce sugar, peanuts, chutneys, cloth, and rugs at home, contributions that the System of National Accounts treats as economic production.

Recent PLFS rounds have shown a sharp jump in the female labour force participation rate, from 23.3 percent in 2017-18 to over 41 percent in 2023-24. Economists are still debating how much of this is a real change and how much is improved measurement. Researchers at the Centre for Economic Data and Analysis note that new PLFS features, such as collecting hours worked in each activity for each day of the reference week, may simply be catching the unpaid family workers and home-based producers who were always there but never appeared in earlier surveys.

Why this matters for policy and the economy

If women’s work is invisible in data, it becomes invisible in policy. Budgets for skill training, credit access, childcare, agricultural extension, and social protection are built on workforce statistics. When 40 percent of agricultural workers in India are women, but they are recorded as “farm wives” rather than farmers, government schemes for inputs, irrigation, credit and technology end up addressed to men. The cost shows up later, in lower farm yields, weaker food security, and rural women being shut out of land rights.

The macroeconomic cost is just as serious. The Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that closing the gender gap in access to productive resources could raise agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 percent. None of that potential gets factored into policy when women are not even on the official list of farmers.

The care economy puzzle

Unpaid care work, the cooking, cleaning, child-minding and elder care that sustains every household, is the other half of the invisibility problem. It is essential labour, it has a clear economic value if you tried to buy it in the market, and it is performed overwhelmingly by women. But because it happens inside the home and produces no marketable output, it sits outside GDP. The result is a national accounting system that treats the work which keeps the workforce alive and functioning as if it were not work at all.

Efforts to count better

The good news is that the statistical system has begun to respond. The most important breakthrough has been the Time Use Survey (TUS).

India’s Time Use Surveys

India ran a pilot Time Use Survey across six states between 1998 and 1999, but the first nationwide TUS was conducted only in 2019. Conducted by the National Statistical Office, the survey covered 1,38,799 households and enumerated over 4.47 lakh persons aged six and above, recording how each person spent every 30-minute slot of a 24-hour period. The whole purpose was to measure participation in paid and unpaid activities together, capturing care-giving, volunteer work, and unpaid domestic services that other surveys ignored.

The findings were stark. An analysis of the 2019 TUS data found that Indian women spend roughly eight times more hours on unpaid care work than men, regardless of education, marital status, or whether they earn their own income. Over 92 percent of women aged 15 to 59 participated in unpaid domestic services, compared with just 29 percent of men. Married women spent 52 percent of their waking hours on unpaid care work; married men spent six percent.

A second Time Use Survey, conducted in 2024 and released in February 2025, showed only a marginal shift. The 2024 data revealed that women’s daily time on unpaid domestic work fell from about 315 minutes in 2019 to 305 minutes, a reduction of just ten minutes over five years, while their participation in employment-related activities rose modestly from 21.8 to 25 percent.

Other reforms quietly happening

Beyond the TUS, several smaller reforms are pushing in the right direction. The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister has flagged that the PLFS misses economically productive activities like poultry farming and dairy work that women perform as part of their “domestic duties.” After correcting for this omission, the Economic Survey 2022-23 placed India’s female labour force participation rate at 46.2 percent for 2020-21, far higher than the conventional figure.

State governments are experimenting too. Kerala has produced a gender budget that explicitly maps unpaid work, and researchers across institutions are pushing for satellite accounts that would value household production alongside GDP. None of these changes are headline-grabbing, but each one chips away at the invisibility.

What still needs to change

Even the Time Use Survey has limits. Critics have pointed out that the background questionnaire is not designed to link care activities to who in the household needs care, or to how care is organised through markets, government or community support. Without this context, the rich time data is hard to translate into specific care policies.

The deeper change has to be conceptual. As long as the line between “economic” and “non-economic” work runs through the kitchen door, women’s labour will keep being half-seen. That means moving from a workforce participation framework that asks “do you have a job” to one that asks “what work do you do,” and counting the second answer with the same seriousness as the first.

What do you think? If the work your mother, sister, or grandmother does every day were assigned a market wage, how would it change your view of who the breadwinner in your home really is? And do you think household questionnaires should ask each adult woman directly about her work, rather than relying on what the head of the household reports about her?

References

PDF 📄

Challenges in Counting Women’s Work: From Household to Economy

Table of Contents

Why women’s work goes uncounted 🔗

The informal sector blind spot 🔗

Social norms that shape the answer 🔗

The role of surveys and censuses 🔗

The PLFS and its limits 🔗

Why this matters for policy and the economy 🔗

The care economy puzzle 🔗

Efforts to count better 🔗

India’s Time Use Surveys 🔗

Other reforms quietly happening 🔗

What still needs to change 🔗

References

Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Women in the Economy