Reimagining Women’s Work: From Domestic Duties to Economic Contributions

For generations, the work that keeps Indian households running, cooking meals, raising children, caring for the elderly, fetching water, managing budgets, has been treated as a labour of love rather than labour itself. It produces no payslip, leaves no entry in the GDP, and yet without it, no factory would open and no office would function. Reimagining women’s work means asking a simple but radical question: what counts as work, and who gets to decide?

The historical invisibility of women’s work
Why this work was rendered invisible
The hidden economy of care
Production versus reproduction
Feminist efforts to redefine work
Debates within feminism
Counting what matters: time-use surveys and policy
Where policy meets the kitchen
Broader impacts of reimagining women’s work
The unfinished agenda

The historical invisibility of women’s work

The idea that women’s place is in the home is not a natural law but a social arrangement, one shaped over centuries by religion, custom, and the industrial economy. As factories pulled men into wage labour during the colonial and post-colonial periods, a sharp boundary emerged between the “productive” public sphere of paid work and the “reproductive” private sphere of unpaid household duties. Women were placed firmly on the unpaid side of that line.

The consequences of this division are measurable. According to the National Statistical Office’s Time Use Survey, 81% of women aged six and above spend more than five hours every day on unpaid domestic work, while only 24.5% of men spend even one hour on it. The gap is not a matter of preference; it is the residue of a long-standing belief that cleaning, cooking, and caring are expressions of femininity rather than economic activity.

Why this work was rendered invisible

Economists working within the System of National Accounts long treated the household as a “black box” that consumed goods but did not produce them. When a maid is hired to cook, her wages count toward GDP. When the woman of the house cooks the same meal, the labour disappears from official statistics. A research paper published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications notes that this invisibility pushes unpaid domestic work outside production boundaries and, consequently, outside the reach of economic policy. What is not counted is not valued, and what is not valued is rarely supported with public investment.

This invisibility is reinforced by cultural scripts. A girl helping her mother in the kitchen is “learning to be a good wife”; a boy doing the same is doing a chore. Marriage, motherhood, and caregiving are framed as duties tied to identity, not occupations that demand time, skill, and energy. The result is a silent transfer of labour from one half of the population to the other, year after year, generation after generation.

The hidden economy of care

If we paused for a moment to put a price tag on this work, the numbers would startle anyone who thinks of domestic labour as trivial. A 2023 report by the State Bank of India estimated that the total contribution of women’s unpaid work to the Indian economy is around Rs 22.7 lakh crore, or roughly 7.5% of GDP. A more recent study by IIM Indore, titled “The Invisible Economy: India’s Care Work Crisis,” pushed this figure even higher, valuing unpaid care and household work between Rs 30 trillion and Rs 90 trillion annually, or 11 to 27% of GDP.

Globally, the picture is similar. An Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation study from 2022 estimated that unpaid work contributes about 9% of GDP across APEC economies, totalling USD 11 trillion. These numbers are not abstract. They represent meals cooked, sick relatives nursed, school-going children supervised, and homes maintained, all without contracts, leave, pensions, or recognition.

Production versus reproduction

Feminist economists draw a useful distinction between productive labour, which produces goods and services for the market, and reproductive labour, which produces and maintains the workers themselves. Reproductive labour includes giving birth, feeding, clothing, educating, and emotionally supporting family members. Without it, the productive economy would simply collapse. Yet for most of modern economic history, only the first category has been counted.

Feminist efforts to redefine work

The push to rethink what counts as work has a long intellectual history. In 1972, three feminist thinkers, Selma James, Silvia Federici, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, founded the Wages for Housework campaign, which insisted that what society called love was, in fact, unwaged work. Their slogan, “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work,” challenged the idea that domestic responsibilities were a private gift from women to their families.

The campaign was as much about visibility as about money. As an analysis by Disruption magazine explains, the movement questioned mainstream understandings of work and asked why labour performed predominantly by women was treated as outside the realm of wages and markets. Federici argued in her 1975 essay Wages Against Housework that the demand was not just about cheques in the post but about a political perspective capable of subverting the role to which women had been confined.

Debates within feminism

Not all feminists agreed that wages were the answer. Some, including American thinker Angela Davis, worried that paying women for housework would further entrench gendered roles rather than liberate women from them. Critics argued that the real goal should be to free women from the demeaning role of “housewife” and open up paid employment on equal terms. Others pointed out that any wage scheme would be deeply complicated to design fairly across class, caste, and region.

These debates were not abstract for India. Indian feminist scholarship, drawing on thinkers like Vina Mazumdar and Devaki Jain, has pushed for the recognition of women’s contributions in agriculture, the informal sector, and the household. Their work shaped landmark reports such as Towards Equality (1974), which forced policymakers to confront the realities of women’s labour beyond the office and the factory.

Counting what matters: time-use surveys and policy

One of the most powerful tools to come out of feminist economics is the time-use survey. By asking people to record exactly how they spend their days, statisticians can finally see the labour that ledgers ignore. India’s first national Time Use Survey was conducted in 2019 by the NSO, and a second round was carried out in 2024. The data has been a revelation, allowing policy researchers to argue with hard numbers that domestic work is real work.

Sustainable Development Goal 5.4 explicitly calls on countries to recognise and value unpaid care and domestic work through public services, infrastructure, and social protection policies. Translating this into practice means investing in piped water so women do not spend hours fetching it, providing affordable childcare so mothers can take up paid jobs, and offering maternity and paternity benefits that distribute caregiving more equally.

Where policy meets the kitchen

Some Indian initiatives are starting to nudge this conversation forward. Schemes such as Jal Jeevan Mission (providing tap water to rural households), Saksham Anganwadi for childcare, the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana for cooking gas, and expanded crèche provisions under labour codes all reduce the time-poverty of women. The Ministry of Labour and Employment has announced a target to raise the Female Labour Force Participation Rate from 41.7% in 2023-24 to 55% by 2030, an ambition that cannot be met without redistributing domestic responsibilities.

However, policy can also misfire. A study highlighted by VoxDev found that the MGNREGA employment guarantee, while reducing poverty, sometimes replaced women as “added workers” within households, weakening their financial autonomy. The lesson is that recognising women’s work requires more than statistics; it requires designing programmes that treat women as economic agents in their own right rather than as supplements to male earners.

Broader impacts of reimagining women’s work

When society begins to see cooking, cleaning, and caring as economic activities, several things shift at once.

Gender roles loosen. If household labour is valued, there is less moral pressure for women to absorb all of it. Men become co-participants rather than helpers, and boys grow up understanding caregiving as a shared human responsibility, not a feminine specialty.

Policy becomes more inclusive. Recognising the care economy creates a rationale for public investment in childcare, eldercare, maternal health, and family-friendly workplaces. Research published by Ideas for India argues that formalising part-time employment and redistributing unpaid care work could raise India’s female labour force participation by six percentage points, from 37% to 43%.

The economy grows. The International Monetary Fund has estimated that closing the gender gap in labour force participation could increase India’s GDP by 27%. Reimagining women’s work is therefore not just a matter of fairness; it is one of the largest untapped growth opportunities in the country.

Women’s bargaining power rises. When women’s work is visible and valued, whether through wages, services, or social respect, their voice within households and communities grows louder. This influences decisions on children’s education, fertility, healthcare, and political participation.

The unfinished agenda

Despite progress, India still ranks poorly on global gender indices. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025 placed India at 131 out of 148 countries, with a particularly weak score on economic participation and opportunity. Wage gaps persist, women remain concentrated in low-productivity informal sectors, and the double burden of domestic and economic work continues to push many out of the labour force entirely.

Reimagining women’s work is therefore an ongoing project. It involves accurate measurement, intelligent policy, supportive infrastructure, and, perhaps most importantly, a cultural shift that allows men and women to share the daily labour of building a home and raising the next generation.

What do you think? If the domestic labour your mother or grandmother performs every day were assigned a fair monthly salary, how would it change the way your family talks about her work? And what is one specific household task in your own home whose value you have probably been taking for granted?

References

PDF 📄

Reimagining Women’s Work: From Domestic Duties to Economic Contributions

Table of Contents

The historical invisibility of women’s work 🔗

Why this work was rendered invisible 🔗

The hidden economy of care 🔗

Production versus reproduction 🔗

Feminist efforts to redefine work 🔗

Debates within feminism 🔗

Counting what matters: time-use surveys and policy 🔗

Where policy meets the kitchen 🔗

Broader impacts of reimagining women’s work 🔗

The unfinished agenda 🔗