How Feminist Economics Challenges Traditional Views of Women’s Work

Walk into any Indian home at 7 in the morning and you’ll see an economy in motion. Tea is being brewed, lunchboxes packed, elderly parents helped with medicine, children dressed for school. None of this work appears in the GDP. None of it earns a salary. Yet without it, no office would open, no factory would run, no economist would have data to analyse. For over a century, mainstream economics simply did not see this labour. Feminist economics emerged to ask a sharp question: how can a discipline that claims to study human wellbeing ignore the work that sustains human life itself?

Why mainstream economics missed half the picture
The androcentric bias in economic theory
The problem with rational choice theory inside the home
Power, not just preferences
Beyond the self-interested actor
The rise of feminist economics as a field
How do you measure invisible work?
Why this reframing matters for policy
From counting to caring

Why mainstream economics missed half the picture

Classical and neoclassical economics built itself around one central figure, the rational, self-interested individual who buys, sells, and works in the market. The market became the stage where all “real” economic action happened. Anything outside it, cooking, cleaning, raising children, caring for the sick, was pushed into a separate sphere often labelled “non-economic” or simply “natural” women’s work.

This boundary had serious consequences. The System of National Accounts, the framework that countries use to calculate GDP, historically excluded unpaid household and care work from production. The economist Marilyn Waring captured the absurdity in her 1988 book If Women Counted, pointing out that if a man married his housekeeper, GDP would fall, because the same work was now being done for free. The work didn’t disappear, only its visibility in the statistics did.

The androcentric bias in economic theory

Feminist economists argue that this blindness is not an innocent oversight. It reflects what they call an androcentric bias, a male-centred way of thinking baked into the foundations of the discipline. The “economic man” of textbooks is autonomous, competitive, and motivated by self-interest. He has no childhood, no old age, and apparently no one who fed him breakfast. As one feminist critique famously asked, who cooked Adam Smith’s dinner? The answer, his mother, never enters the story of how the market produces wealth.

By treating the household as a black box outside the economy, mainstream theory ignored social reproduction, the daily and generational work of producing and sustaining the workers themselves. Marxist feminists like Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa were among the first to argue that capitalism depends on a vast hidden subsidy of unpaid reproductive labour, almost entirely performed by women.

The problem with rational choice theory inside the home

If mainstream economics struggled to see the household, it struggled even more when it tried to model it. Gary Becker’s “new home economics” treated the family as a single decision-making unit, a kind of mini-firm where a benevolent head pools resources and allocates them efficiently to maximise the family’s joint utility. On paper, this looked tidy. In reality, it erased every conflict, every inequality, and every act of negotiation that happens inside real households.

Power, not just preferences

Feminist economists challenged this unitary household model directly. Indian economist Bina Agarwal, in her influential 1997 paper on bargaining and gender relations, showed that households are not harmonious units but sites of cooperation and conflict. Who eats first, who studies longer, who decides on contraception, who inherits land, all of these are bargained outcomes shaped by power, not by some neutral family welfare function.

What determines a person’s bargaining power inside the home? Agarwal’s answer pulled the analysis outside the household walls. A woman’s fallback position, what she can credibly do if the bargain breaks down, depends on her ownership of land and assets, her access to paid work, her support networks, and the social norms around remarriage or returning to her natal family. In rural South Asia, where women rarely inherit land and re-entering the labour market is hard, that fallback position is brutally weak. The “choice” to accept an unequal division of work and resources is hardly a free choice at all.

Amartya Sen made a parallel point through his concept of cooperative conflicts, arguing that social norms that devalue women’s unpaid work systematically disadvantage them in intra-household bargaining. If a woman believes her contribution is less important than her brother’s wage, she will accept less food, less education, less rest, and the household will agree. Perceptions of contribution shape entitlements.

Beyond the self-interested actor

Feminist economists also questioned the very psychology behind rational choice theory. Real human beings, especially those doing care work, are not the calculating loners of textbook models. Nancy Folbre and others have argued that economies run as much on cooperation, altruism, and a sense of responsibility as they do on self-interest. Mothers do not weigh the marginal utility of comforting a crying child against the wage they could earn in that hour, and treating them as if they did misses the point of care entirely.

The rise of feminist economics as a field

Out of these critiques grew a distinct intellectual movement. Feminist economics emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, took organised form with the founding of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) in 1992, and gained its own peer-reviewed journal, Feminist Economics, in 1995. It is now a recognised, though still contested, branch of the discipline.

Its goals are both critical and reconstructive. Feminist economics aims to expose gender biases in concepts, methods, and data; to make unpaid and care work visible in economic analysis; to inform policies that promote gender equality; and to broaden the definition of “the economy” itself to include the household, the community, and the environment. As the field has matured, it has also adopted an intersectional lens, examining how gender interacts with caste, class, race, and migration status to shape economic outcomes.

How do you measure invisible work?

One concrete achievement has been the push for time use surveys. Instead of asking only “do you work?”, these surveys ask people to record every activity in a 24-hour day. India conducted its first nationwide Time Use Survey in 2019 and its second in 2024, joining a small group of countries that systematically measure unpaid work.

The findings are striking. According to the 2024 survey, women aged 15 to 59 spend roughly 305 minutes a day on unpaid domestic work compared with 88 minutes for men, and about 137 minutes on caregiving against 75 minutes for men. An earlier analysis of the 2019 data found that Indian women perform roughly eight times more hours of unpaid care work than men, a gap that barely narrows with education or paid employment. Women with degrees and salaries still come home to a second, unpaid shift.

Feminist economists have also developed methods to estimate the monetary value of this work, using approaches such as the opportunity cost method, the replacement cost method, and the input-output cost method. The exact figures vary, but every serious estimate suggests that if unpaid household and care work were counted, it would add trillions of rupees to India’s measured economy.

Why this reframing matters for policy

Recognising unpaid work is not just a matter of academic accounting. It changes what governments are expected to do. If care work is visible, then a lack of childcare, the closure of public health centres, or cuts to elderly care services are no longer “private family matters” but public economic decisions that shift costs onto women’s unpaid time. Feminist economists have shown that austerity policies, which cut social spending, tend to fall hardest on women because the work the state stops doing must still be done by someone, usually unpaid, usually female.

The implications for India are direct. The persistently low female labour force participation rate is not simply a question of skills or aspirations. When a woman spends five hours a day on cooking, cleaning, and caregiving, she has neither the time nor the energy for paid employment. Investment in childcare centres, piped water, clean cooking fuel, and public transport is therefore not just social welfare. It is economic policy that frees up time for paid work, education, and rest.

From counting to caring

The deeper contribution of feminist economics is not just adding women to existing models. As one survey of the field put it, the project is not “add women and stir,” but a rethinking of the assumptions that economists make about who acts, what counts as work, and what an economy is for. It puts the sustaining of human life, not the maximising of GDP, at the centre of the question.

What do you think? If the unpaid hours spent cooking, cleaning, and caring in your own household were added to the national accounts, how would your sense of who “earns” and who “supports” the family change? And what kinds of public services would you most want a government to invest in to redistribute this invisible workload more fairly?

References

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How Feminist Economics Challenges Traditional Views of Women’s Work

Table of Contents

Why mainstream economics missed half the picture 🔗

The androcentric bias in economic theory 🔗

The problem with rational choice theory inside the home 🔗

Power, not just preferences 🔗

Beyond the self-interested actor 🔗

The rise of feminist economics as a field 🔗

How do you measure invisible work? 🔗

Why this reframing matters for policy 🔗

From counting to caring 🔗