Traditional Economic Views on Women's Work and its Implications

Economics, as a discipline, has long claimed to study how societies produce, distribute, and consume goods and services. Yet for most of its history, it has quietly ignored a massive part of that activity – the cooking, cleaning, caregiving, and household management that keeps the entire workforce alive and functioning. This blind spot is not accidental. It reflects deep assumptions in traditional economic thought about what counts as “real” work and who does it. Understanding these traditional discourses on women and work helps explain why female labour is often undervalued, underpaid, and undercounted even today.

How early economic theories defined work
The public-private divide
Women as a reserve army of cheap labour
Wartime mobilisation and its reversal
Why cheap, why disposable
Counting the uncounted – household labour and the economy
What the numbers reveal
Time poverty and the female labour force puzzle
Why the traditional framework still matters

How early economic theories defined work

Classical and neoclassical economics, developed largely between the 18th and 20th centuries, built their frameworks around market transactions. Work meant activity that produced goods or services for sale, earned a wage, and could be measured in monetary terms. Anything outside this market boundary was, by definition, not economic activity at all.

Adam Smith, often called the father of modern economics, focused his analysis on the division of labour in pin factories and market production. He paid little attention to the daily labour of his own mother, who cooked his meals and managed his home while he wrote The Wealth of Nations. This omission became a template. The “economic man” at the centre of classical theory was a rational, self-interested individual making choices in the marketplace – implicitly male, implicitly free of caregiving responsibilities, and implicitly supported by someone else’s invisible labour at home.

The public-private divide

Industrialisation deepened this divide. As production moved out of homes and into factories, a sharp line was drawn between the “public” sphere of paid work and the “private” sphere of the household. Since mothers and housewives received no pay for their work, it came to be seen as valueless – not actually work at all. By the mid-twentieth century, even leading sociologists like Talcott Parsons treated wives and mothers as specialists in “expressive” emotional behaviour rather than economic producers.

This framing had consequences far beyond theory. National accounting systems like Gross Domestic Product (GDP), developed in the 1930s and 1940s, formalised the exclusion. If a woman cooked dinner for her family, it did not enter GDP. If a restaurant served the same meal, it did. The economy was defined by the cash register, not by human effort.

Women as a reserve army of cheap labour

While women’s household work was dismissed as non-economic, their paid labour was treated very differently – as something that could be summoned when needed and dismissed when no longer convenient. Marxist and feminist scholars in the 1970s described this pattern using the concept of a “reserve army of labour,” a flexible pool of workers that capitalism draws on during expansion and pushes back out during contraction.

Wartime mobilisation and its reversal

The clearest demonstration came during the two World Wars. With millions of men drafted into military service, factories faced acute labour shortages. Governments suddenly discovered that women were perfectly capable of welding, riveting, operating heavy machinery, and running entire production lines. In the United States, the overall share of women in the workforce jumped from 27 to 37 percent during World War II, with women working in construction, driving trucks, building munitions, planes, and ships.

The same pattern was visible elsewhere. When the United States government entered a war, it offered work opportunities to women in significantly higher numbers than had been seen previously. Propaganda campaigns like “Rosie the Riveter” celebrated working women as patriotic heroes.

Then peace arrived, and the script flipped. The arrival of peace ended the wartime boom in female employment almost as abruptly as it began, with female employment declining precipitously in the fall of 1945 and spring of 1946. Women were pushed out of skilled industrial jobs, told their patriotic duty was now to return home, and replaced by returning male veterans. The same labour that had been “essential” was suddenly “unsuitable” for women.

Why cheap, why disposable

Several features made women particularly useful as reserve labour. Their wages could be set lower because society treated their income as “supplementary” to a male breadwinner’s earnings – even when many women were sole earners. Their attachment to the workforce was treated as temporary, justifying fewer benefits and weaker job security. And because household labour was already assumed to be their primary responsibility, employers could pay them less while expecting them to absorb caregiving demands on their own time.

This logic did not disappear after the wars. It continues today in the over-representation of women in part-time work, contract employment, the gig economy, and informal sectors. In many countries, women’s unpaid labour subsidises the cost of maintaining and reproducing the workforce, allowing companies to gain productive workers without paying for the care work that makes their productivity possible.

Counting the uncounted – household labour and the economy

From the 1970s onward, feminist economists like Margaret Reid, Marilyn Waring, and Nancy Folbre began systematically challenging the exclusion of household labour from economic measurement. Their argument was straightforward: if a task would have to be paid for were it not done at home – childcare, cooking, eldercare, cleaning – then it has clear economic value, regardless of whether money changes hands.

What the numbers reveal

When researchers actually tried to measure unpaid domestic work, the results were staggering. According to the International Labour Organization, the value of unpaid domestic work could account for up to 30% of GDP in many countries. A 2022 study by Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation estimated that unpaid work contributes about 9% of GDP across APEC economies, totalling roughly USD 11 trillion, while estimates across nations range from 10% to 60% of GDP.

India’s own data tells a similar story. The Time Use Survey conducted by the National Statistical Office offers one of the most detailed pictures available. Indian women spent 289 minutes per day in 2024 on unpaid domestic work as against 88 minutes spent by men, and women allocated 83.9% of their time to unpaid work compared to 45.8% for men.

Translating those hours into rupees, a government report has estimated the economic value of women’s unpaid domestic work at between 15 and 17 percent of India’s GDP. Other analyses place the figure even higher when caregiving is fully accounted for. By any measure, this is not a marginal contribution – it rivals entire sectors like manufacturing or information technology in size.

Time poverty and the female labour force puzzle

Recognising household labour also helps explain one of India’s most discussed economic puzzles: the falling female labour force participation rate. Why have so many Indian women stayed out of paid work even as the economy has grown? Part of the answer lies in time poverty. When women already work five to six hours a day on unrecognised tasks, taking on additional paid employment becomes physically and logistically difficult.

The Time Use Survey shows that caregiving responsibilities within households remain predominantly female-oriented, with 41% of women aged 15-59 participating in caregiving activities compared to 21.4% of men. Without public investment in childcare, eldercare, and other support infrastructure, women effectively face a second shift that limits their labour market choices.

Why the traditional framework still matters

The traditional economic view of women’s work was not just an oversight. It shaped tax policy, social security systems, pension calculations, and labour laws. A retired homemaker who spent fifty years raising children and managing a household receives no pension based on that work. A woman who steps out of paid employment to care for a sick parent loses both income and future earning capacity. National economic strategies prioritise sectors that show up in GDP, leaving care infrastructure chronically underfunded.

Some countries have started to respond. New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and several European nations now conduct regular time-use surveys and produce “satellite accounts” that measure household production alongside GDP. The 1993 and 2008 revisions of the System of National Accounts allow for such parallel accounting. India has taken steps in this direction with two rounds of the Time Use Survey, but a full household production satellite account remains absent.

Recognising women’s work is not only about fairness. It changes how we understand economic growth itself. If a country reports rising GDP while women shift from unpaid household work to paid employment, part of that “growth” may simply be the re-labelling of work that was always being done. Conversely, cuts to public services that push caregiving back onto households may look efficient on paper while increasing the total unpaid burden on women.

What do you think? If unpaid domestic and care work were officially counted in GDP, how do you think it would change economic policy priorities in your own state or city? And in your own family, who does the cooking, cleaning, and caregiving – and has anyone ever calculated what that labour would cost if it had to be hired out?

References

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Table of Contents

How early economic theories defined work 🔗

The public-private divide 🔗

Women as a reserve army of cheap labour 🔗

Wartime mobilisation and its reversal 🔗

Why cheap, why disposable 🔗

Counting the uncounted – household labour and the economy 🔗

What the numbers reveal 🔗

Time poverty and the female labour force puzzle 🔗

Why the traditional framework still matters 🔗