Redefining Women’s Work: Towards a Holistic Economic Framework

For decades, the question “What is work?” has had a deceptively simple answer in economics: work is what produces goods and services for the market. But this narrow definition has rendered the labour of crores of women invisible, even though they cook, clean, fetch water, care for children, nurse the elderly, and sustain entire households without a paycheck. Redefining work is no longer an academic exercise; it is a structural correction needed to make economic statistics, policies, and budgets reflect reality.

Why the current definition of work falls short
The scale of invisible labour
Broadening the definition of work
From production boundary to satellite accounts
Policy reforms for visibility
Steps taken in India
Mechanisms for valuing women’s work
Time-use measurement
Input methods: opportunity cost and replacement cost
Output methods
Generational accounting and the NTTA framework
Why redefining work matters for policy

Why the current definition of work falls short

National accounting systems across the world rely on the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA), which draws a boundary around what counts as “production.” Unpaid domestic services, caregiving inside the home, and most volunteer activities fall outside this boundary. The result is that a cooked meal counts towards GDP if bought in a restaurant but not if prepared at home by a mother or grandmother. A childcare worker contributes to the economy on paper, but a woman raising her own children does not.

This omission is not gender-neutral. The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation’s Time Use Survey of 2019 found that women aged 15-59 spend 43 to 47 percent of their waking hours on unpaid care work, while men spend only about 5 percent. The 2024 round showed almost no improvement: women’s daily time on unpaid domestic services dropped marginally from 299 to 289 minutes, while men’s dropped from 97 to 88 minutes. When the workers are overwhelmingly women, an undercount of their work is an undercount of women themselves.

The scale of invisible labour

How big is this missing economy? Estimates vary because methodologies differ, but the numbers are striking. A 2023 State Bank of India report calculated that the contribution of unpaid women’s work to the economy is around Rs 22.7 lakh crore, roughly 7.5 percent of GDP. A recent study from IIM Indore went further, estimating that unpaid care and household work is worth between Rs 30 trillion and Rs 90 trillion annually, or 11 to 27 percent of GDP. Globally, the International Labour Organization estimates unpaid care work contributes between 10 and 39 percent of GDP across economies.

Broadening the definition of work

Redefining work means accepting a wider production boundary, one that recognises three categories that the SNA traditionally excludes: unpaid domestic services for one’s own household, unpaid caregiving for family members, and volunteer or community work. Feminist economists have long argued that the choice to exclude these from “the economy” is not neutral; it is a historical decision that reflected who held statistical and political power when national accounts were first designed in the mid-twentieth century.

From production boundary to satellite accounts

One pragmatic solution has been the development of satellite accounts. These are supplementary statistical frameworks that sit alongside core GDP figures and measure activities outside the SNA boundary, without disturbing the core accounts. The 2008 SNA itself recommends the use of a satellite account for non-market household services such as cooking, cleaning, childcare, and elderly care that are produced and consumed within the same household.

Several countries have built such household production satellite accounts. A 2023 study in Poland, for instance, found that non-SNA household production would add another 46.5 percent to the country’s reported GDP. India has not yet built a regular satellite account for unpaid household work, but the publication of two Time Use Surveys in 2019 and 2024 has finally created the raw data needed to do so.

Policy reforms for visibility

International institutions have converged on a clear framework. The ILO’s 5R approach, formally adopted in the 2024 Resolution concerning decent work and the care economy, calls on countries to recognize, reduce and redistribute unpaid care work, and reward and represent paid care workers. Sustainable Development Goal indicator 5.4.1 directly tracks the proportion of time spent on unpaid domestic and care work, disaggregated by sex, age and location, putting time-use data at the centre of global policy monitoring.

Steps taken in India

India’s first nationally representative Time Use Survey, conducted between January and December 2019, covered roughly 1.4 lakh households and surveyed more than 4.4 lakh persons aged six and above across all states and union territories. By repeating the survey in 2024, the statistical system has signalled that the measurement of unpaid work is becoming a routine part of national data collection rather than a one-off experiment.

The judiciary has begun to follow suit. In a notable 2024 decision, the Supreme Court recognised the monetary contribution of unpaid care work by women as “deemed income” while calculating motor accident compensation. This judicial acknowledgement gives legal weight to the idea that homemakers are economic contributors, not dependents.

Policy levers exist beyond data collection. Investing in care infrastructure such as creches, anganwadis, piped water, clean fuel and elderly care reduces the time burden of unpaid work. The Women’s Budget Group has estimated that an additional 2 percent of GDP invested in the health and care sector could generate around 11 million additional jobs, almost a third of which would go to women. Maternity benefits, paternity leave, and the formalisation of frontline care workers such as ASHAs, ANMs and anganwadi workers are also part of this reform agenda.

Mechanisms for valuing women’s work

Once we accept that unpaid work should be measured, the next question is technical: how do we estimate its value in rupees? Two broad approaches are used internationally, with several variations.

Time-use measurement

The foundation of any valuation is reliable time-use data. Time Use Surveys ask respondents to record how they spent each half-hour of a 24-hour period across a defined list of activities. In India’s 2019 survey, data was collected for one day in a week using a 24-hour time diary running from 4 am to 4 am the next day, divided into 30-minute slots. This level of granularity allows analysts to separate paid work, unpaid domestic services, caregiving, learning, leisure and self-care.

Input methods: opportunity cost and replacement cost

Input methods value unpaid work by attaching a wage to the time spent on it. Two common variants exist. The opportunity cost method uses the wage the person could have earned in the labour market if they had worked for pay instead. The replacement cost method uses the wage that would have to be paid to a market worker to perform the same task. Within replacement cost, the generalist approach uses a single all-purpose wage (such as a domestic helper’s wage), while the specialist approach assigns different wages to different tasks, say a cook’s wage for cooking and a nurse’s wage for elderly care.

Eurostat’s guidance on household satellite accounts recommends the housekeeper replacement cost method as the most appropriate method to value household labour. The SBI estimate for India used a similar logic, assuming a monthly income of Rs 5,000 in rural and Rs 8,000 in urban areas for 8 hours per day, applied to the female population in working ages.

Output methods

An alternative is to value the output of household production rather than the input of labour. Here, the meal cooked at home is valued at the market price of an equivalent meal, the childcare provided is priced at creche rates, and so on, with the cost of inputs deducted to arrive at value added. UN guidance notes that an output approach can yield estimates that are more consistent with the way activity is valued within the core SNA production boundary, especially when tracking transitions between market and non-market provision.

Generational accounting and the NTTA framework

Newer methodologies push further. The National Time Transfer Accounts approach, applied to India by researchers at the International Institute for Population Sciences, links time-use data with age-specific population data to map who produces and who consumes unpaid care across the life cycle. Their analysis finds that women are net givers of unpaid care work from age 16 to 79, while men are net beneficiaries across all ages. This framing reveals unpaid care as a system of intergenerational transfers, not just individual labour.

Why redefining work matters for policy

Measurement shapes policy. When women’s unpaid contribution is invisible, female labour force participation rates appear low, women are framed as economically inactive, and policy attention drifts elsewhere. When it becomes visible, the policy questions change: How can care infrastructure free women’s time? Should social protection extend to homemakers? Should fiscal policy explicitly invest in the care economy? The ILO estimates that a public investment equivalent to 2 percent of GDP in India could create over 10 million employment opportunities by 2030, with women as a major beneficiary group.

Equally, redefining work matters for individual women’s rights. Recognition translates into legal entitlements, fairer divorce settlements, compensation in accident and pension cases, and, eventually, intra-household bargaining power. The conceptual shift from “housewife” to “household worker” is small in language but vast in implication.

What do you think? If unpaid care work were fully counted in GDP, how do you think it would change the political conversation about women’s “economic participation” in India? And which single policy reform, better data, paid leave, public childcare, or social protection for homemakers, would unlock the most change in your view?

References

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Redefining Women’s Work: Towards a Holistic Economic Framework

Table of Contents

Why the current definition of work falls short 🔗

The scale of invisible labour 🔗

Broadening the definition of work 🔗

From production boundary to satellite accounts 🔗

Policy reforms for visibility 🔗

Steps taken in India 🔗

Mechanisms for valuing women’s work 🔗

Time-use measurement 🔗

Input methods: opportunity cost and replacement cost 🔗

Output methods 🔗

Generational accounting and the NTTA framework 🔗

Why redefining work matters for policy 🔗