Why Measuring Productive and Reproductive Work is Crucial for Gender Equality

Every morning across the country, millions of women wake up before sunrise to cook, clean, fetch water, care for children, and look after the elderly. None of this shows up in the GDP. None of it earns a salary. Yet without this invisible labour, no economy could function for a single day. The way we measure work, and what we choose to leave out, has shaped policies, opportunities, and gender roles for nearly a century. Understanding why measurement matters is the first step towards building a more equal economy.

The care economy and why time use matters
Why GDP misses the bigger picture
Margaret Reid’s third-person criterion
How the criterion works
Why this idea was revolutionary
Limitations of the criterion
The scale of unpaid work in India
The problem of time poverty
From measurement to policy change
Investing in care infrastructure
Redistributing care work within households
Better data, better decisions
Why this matters for gender equality

The care economy and why time use matters

The care economy refers to all the paid and unpaid activities that sustain human life on a daily basis, from cooking and cleaning to looking after children, the sick, and the elderly. While paid care workers like nurses and domestic helpers are counted in economic statistics, the much larger portion of this work happens inside households for free. Women globally perform more than three-quarters of the time spent in unpaid care work, and in Asia and the Pacific they do 4.1 times more of it than men.

To make this invisible labour visible, economists rely on time use surveys. These are large-scale studies that ask people to record how they spend each hour of the day. The findings expose stark realities. According to the National Statistical Office’s Time Use Survey 2024, Indian women spend an average of 305 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services compared to a fraction of that for men. That works out to nearly five hours daily, almost eight times what men contribute.

Measuring this time is not just an academic exercise. Without numbers, there is no policy. Without policy, the work remains invisible, undervalued, and disproportionately carried by women.

Why GDP misses the bigger picture

Gross Domestic Product, the headline measure of an economy, only counts goods and services that are bought and sold in the market. A meal cooked at home by a mother does not count. The same meal prepared in a restaurant does. A grandmother caring for her grandchildren is economically invisible. A daycare worker doing the same task is part of the GDP. This blind spot in national accounting is one of the most significant biases in modern economics, and it has serious consequences for how societies value women’s contributions.

Margaret Reid’s third-person criterion

Long before feminist economics became a recognised field, an American economist named Margaret Reid proposed a simple but powerful way to identify what should count as productive work. In her 1934 book Economics of Household Production, she argued that unpaid work should be recognised as economic activity if it could, in principle, be transferred through a market. This insight became known as the third-person criterion, or sometimes the third-party criterion.

How the criterion works

The test is straightforward. Ask yourself: could a third person be paid to do this activity instead of the household member? If the answer is yes, the activity counts as productive work. Household production consists of those unpaid activities which are carried on by and for the members, which could be replaced by market goods or paid services if the household chose to outsource them.

Consider some everyday examples. Cooking dinner can be replaced by hiring a cook or buying takeaway, so it qualifies as productive work. Cleaning the house can be delegated to a paid worker, so it counts too. Caring for a toddler can be done by a creche or a nanny, making it work. But sleeping, eating, or watching a film cannot be outsourced to anyone else, so they remain personal activities outside the production boundary.

This criterion gave statisticians and economists a clear, objective way to draw the line between productive and non-productive activities within the home. By the 1970s, this criterion had become a consensus among economic statisticians and is now used worldwide in time use surveys and household satellite accounts.

Why this idea was revolutionary

Before Reid, mainstream economics treated households as units of consumption, not production. The home was where workers (mostly men) rested between their real jobs in factories and offices. Reid challenged this view by insisting that the household itself was, in her words, society’s most important economic institution. Her work laid the foundation for feminist economics decades before it became a recognised discipline. She warned more than eighty years ago that a singular focus on the part of the economic system organised on a price basis had blinded economists to the productive work of the household.

Limitations of the criterion

The third-person criterion is not perfect. Some activities sit in grey zones. Gardening, for instance, could be hired out, but many people consider it leisure. Playing with children is technically delegable, but it is also a deeply personal act of love. Cultural context also matters. In a society where pipe-borne water to households is the norm, fetching water from a stream will be a rare activity, while in rural areas of developing countries it can consume hours every day. Despite these grey areas, the criterion remains the most widely accepted tool for identifying unpaid productive work.

The scale of unpaid work in India

When the third-person criterion is applied to Indian households, the results are staggering. The estimated economic value of women’s unpaid domestic work ranges from 15 to 17 percent of India’s GDP, according to government estimates. A recent study from IIM Indore went further, calculating that unpaid care and household work performed largely by women could be worth between Rs 30 trillion and Rs 90 trillion annually, amounting to 11 to 27 per cent of GDP.

The Time Use Survey data also reveals the unequal distribution of this labour. Women in paid employment take on approximately six times more unpaid care work than employed men, creating what researchers call a double burden. Even when women enter the formal workforce, they continue to shoulder the lion’s share of domestic responsibilities.

The problem of time poverty

Time poverty is the condition of having too little time to meet one’s basic needs after fulfilling work and care obligations. A two-hour increase in unpaid labour commitments correlates with a 10 percent decrease in the female labour force participation rate. Put simply, the more time women spend on unpaid work, the less time they have for paid employment, education, rest, or political participation. Time poverty and income poverty reinforce each other in a vicious cycle that traps women in economic dependence.

From measurement to policy change

Recognising and measuring unpaid work is only the first step. The real value comes from using that data to design better policies. The 5R Framework developed by the International Labour Organization offers a useful roadmap. It calls for Recognising, Reducing, and Redistributing unpaid work, and Rewarding and Representing paid care workers.

Investing in care infrastructure

One of the most effective ways to reduce women’s care burden is to invest in public care services. Even modest public investment in care services can generate jobs and dramatically expand women’s workforce participation. Affordable creches, eldercare centres, and reliable water and sanitation infrastructure all free up women’s time for education and employment. For India, direct public investment equivalent to 2 percent of GDP can potentially generate 11 million jobs, nearly 70 percent of which would go to women.

Redistributing care work within households

Public investment alone cannot fix the problem. Social norms around who does what at home need to shift. Paid paternity leave, awareness campaigns, and school curricula that challenge gendered expectations can encourage men to share domestic responsibilities. India fares better than many of its peers in offering 26 weeks of maternity leave, but paternity provisions remain weak in the private sector. Without men stepping up at home, women’s time poverty will persist.

Better data, better decisions

Regular time use surveys are essential for tracking progress. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action of 1995 emphasised the importance of such surveys in measuring unpaid work and recognising the contributions of both men and women to the economy. The release of the second National Time Use Survey in 2024 shows growing institutional commitment to making invisible labour visible. The next step is ensuring that this data actually shapes budgets, schemes, and labour laws.

Why this matters for gender equality

Measurement is power. What gets counted gets valued, and what gets valued gets resourced. For nearly a century, the work that sustains families and communities has been excluded from the official story of the economy. This exclusion is not just a statistical oversight. It is a structural choice that has kept women economically dependent, politically underrepresented, and socially undervalued.

Margaret Reid’s third-person criterion gave us the tool to challenge this exclusion. Time use surveys give us the evidence. The care economy framework gives us the language. What remains is the political will to act on what we now know. Recognising unpaid work as real work is not about putting a price tag on love or care. It is about ensuring that the people who do this work, overwhelmingly women, are not punished economically and socially for the labour that holds everything else together.

What do you think? If unpaid care work in your own household were valued at market rates, how would it change the way contributions are recognised at home? And do you think India is ready to treat care infrastructure with the same seriousness as roads, railways, and digital networks?

References

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Why Measuring Productive and Reproductive Work is Crucial for Gender Equality

Table of Contents

The care economy and why time use matters 🔗

Why GDP misses the bigger picture 🔗

Margaret Reid’s third-person criterion 🔗

How the criterion works 🔗

Why this idea was revolutionary 🔗

Limitations of the criterion 🔗

The scale of unpaid work in India 🔗

The problem of time poverty 🔗

From measurement to policy change 🔗

Investing in care infrastructure 🔗

Redistributing care work within households 🔗

Better data, better decisions 🔗

Why this matters for gender equality 🔗