Types of Work Women Contribute to the Economy: Visible and Invisible

When someone asks “Are you working?”, the answer depends entirely on whose definition of work you accept. A woman who spends her morning weeding a family field, her afternoon cooking for eight people, and her evening helping her child with homework has worked harder than most office-goers. Yet by official economic counts, much of her labour does not exist. Understanding the different types of work women perform, and why some kinds get counted while others slip through the cracks, is the first step to fixing how we measure an economy.

Why “work” is not a neutral word 🔗

In economics, “work” is not whatever feels tiring. It is defined by what the System of National Accounts (SNA) calls the production boundary, a line drawn by the United Nations that decides which activities count as economic production. Activities inside the boundary contribute to GDP. Activities outside it, no matter how essential, do not. For decades, almost all unpaid household services performed for one’s own family have sat outside this boundary, and feminist economists have criticised the SNA because leaving out unpaid work means basic and necessary labour is ignored.

This is not a small technical detail. It shapes how governments calculate national income, design welfare schemes, and decide whose contributions deserve recognition. The economist Marilyn Waring’s 1988 book If Women Counted was the first systematic critique of this measurement system, and her arguments eventually pushed the UN to rethink what GDP includes.

Productive versus unproductive work 🔗

The distinction between “productive” and “unproductive” work is one of the oldest debates in economics, and one of the most gendered. Conventional economics labels an activity productive only if it produces a good or service that is exchanged in the market or contributes to national output. Cooking a meal at a restaurant is productive. Cooking the same meal at home, for the same family that would otherwise have eaten at the restaurant, is not. The food is identical; the labour is identical; only the wage payment differs.

This binary is at the heart of feminist critique. Writers at the India Development Review point out that housework is conventionally split into “economic” and “non-economic” categories, creating a divide between labour that is productive and accounted for and labour that is not considered productive and is unaccounted for. The work itself is not unproductive in any real sense. Childcare, for instance, raises the next generation of workers; eldercare keeps elderly relatives healthy; cooking maintains the daily energy of paid workers. Without this labour, the so-called “productive” economy could not function for a single day.

What gets called unproductive, and why it matters 🔗

Activities most often labelled unproductive include cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, fetching water and firewood, caring for children, the elderly, and the sick, and managing the household. Almost all of these tasks are performed disproportionately by women. When economists call them unproductive, they are not saying these tasks are unimportant. They are saying these tasks do not have a market price attached to them. But this conflation of “no market price” with “no economic value” is precisely what makes women’s contribution invisible. Research valuing India’s unpaid household work has estimated it at between 24.6% and 32.4% of nominal GDP for 2019-20, a contribution larger than several major industries combined.

Paid versus unpaid work 🔗

A more practical way to slice women’s work is paid versus unpaid. Paid work is any activity that earns wages or income, including salaried jobs, wage labour on farms, running a small shop, or selling produce at a market. Unpaid work covers everything that contributes to household or community welfare without monetary compensation.

Unpaid work itself splits into two important categories. The first is unpaid economic work, which the SNA partly recognises. This includes women who work in family enterprises like farms, dairies, or small businesses without receiving wages. According to Data For India, more than one in three working women, or roughly 70 million, do economically productive work for no wages, in household enterprises engaged in crop cultivation, livestock, retail sale of food, or small-scale manufacturing. They are officially termed “unpaid helpers in household enterprises,” and women are about twice as likely as men to fall into this category.

The second category is unpaid domestic and care work, which sits almost entirely outside the production boundary. This is cooking for one’s own family, cleaning one’s own house, caring for one’s own children. Even when the very same tasks would be paid if performed for someone else’s household (think of a domestic worker or a paid nanny), they earn nothing when done for one’s own family. This is what economists call the third-person criterion: if a task could in principle be delegated to a third party for pay, it is work. By this definition, almost everything women do at home qualifies as work, even if the market does not pay for it.

The double burden 🔗

One consequence of this structure is what is often called the double burden or second shift. Women who take up paid jobs do not see their unpaid work disappear. They simply add the paid hours on top of the unpaid ones. CBGA notes that most women still prefer part-time engagement in paid activities, often working from home, and such arrangements often blur the lines between paid and unpaid work. The unpaid care economy, in other words, acts as a constraint on women’s ability to take up better-paid work outside the home.

The invisible economy 🔗

UN Women estimates that women carry out at least two and a half times more unpaid household and care work than men globally, and that this work is valued at between 10 and 39 per cent of GDP, contributing more to the economy than manufacturing, commerce, or transportation in many countries. Yet because this work is unpaid, it is rarely treated as “real” work by policymakers, by the women’s own families, or sometimes by the women themselves.

The cost of this invisibility is not just symbolic. When unpaid work is not measured, it cannot be reduced or redistributed. Public investment in childcare, eldercare, water supply, and clean cooking fuel are all interventions that reduce women’s unpaid burden, but governments rarely treat them as economic policy because the labour being saved was never counted as economic in the first place.

The role of time-use surveys 🔗

This is where time-use surveys enter the picture as a tool for visibility. A time-use survey (TUS) asks a representative sample of people to record exactly how they spent their time over a 24-hour period, usually in 30-minute slots. Unlike employment surveys, which ask people what their main “occupation” is, time-use surveys capture every activity, paid or unpaid, productive or personal, that fills the day.

India conducted its first pilot TUS in 1998-99 and its first national TUS in 2019. The second National Time Use Survey was conducted by the National Statistical Office (NSO) under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation between January and December 2024, with results released in February 2025.

What India’s TUS 2024 reveals 🔗

The numbers tell a striking story. According to the TUS 2024, females spent 289 minutes daily on unpaid domestic services in 2024 compared to just 88 minutes by men, and 81.5% of females above the age of 6 participated in unpaid domestic work compared to 27.1% of men. On caregiving, 41% of women aged 15-59 participate in caregiving for household members compared to only 21.4% of men in the same age group, and women’s participation in caregiving has risen from 32.7% in 2019 to 41% in 2024.

The Print, summarising the same data, observes that women spend nearly five hours a day on unpaid domestic and care work, almost eight times as much as men, and this imbalance is a structural constraint on women’s participation in paid work. Paid employment shows the mirror image: men spend 473 minutes a day on employment-related activities, while women spend only 341 minutes.

Why time-use surveys matter beyond the data 🔗

Time-use surveys do three things that conventional labour surveys cannot. First, they capture the simultaneity of women’s work: a woman tending cattle while watching a child while stirring a pot is doing three things at once, and only a time-use design captures that. Second, they measure the unpaid work that sits outside the SNA, allowing governments to assign a monetary value to it through methods like the replacement cost or opportunity cost approach. Third, they expose the gender gap in time itself, what economists call time poverty, where women have so little discretionary time that paid work, education, leisure, and political participation all become difficult.

The data from successive surveys can drive policy. For example, knowing that rural women spend hours collecting water and firewood is a direct case for investing in piped water and clean cooking fuel. Knowing that mothers spend 140 minutes a day on childcare is a case for public crèches and longer school hours. Without time-use surveys, these arguments remain anecdotal.

Towards a fuller definition of work 🔗

The deeper lesson is that the categories economics has inherited, productive versus unproductive, paid versus unpaid, are not natural laws. They are conventions, written largely by people who did not perform the work being defined out of existence. Revising the production boundary, conducting regular time-use surveys, investing in care infrastructure, and redistributing unpaid work between men and women are all parts of the same project: making women’s contribution to the economy visible, valued, and shared.

What do you think? If unpaid domestic and care work were officially counted in GDP, how would it change the way governments make economic policy? And in your own household, who does most of the cooking, cleaning, and caregiving, and would the people doing it call it “work”?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_economics
2. https://idronline.org/its-time-to-compensate-womens-unpaid-labour/
3. https://thelaw.institute/law-and-vulnerable-groups/valuing-womens-work-bridging-productive-reproductive-labor/
4. https://www.dataforindia.com/work-women-and-work-in-india/
5. https://www.cbgaindia.org/opinion/womens-paid-and-unpaid-work-some-reflections/
6. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/redistribute-unpaid-work
7. https://www.businesstoday.in/amp/india/story/time-use-survey-women-take-on-most-of-household-and-caregiving-work-465946-2025-02-25
8. https://www.policycircle.org/opinion/time-use-survey-womens-unpaid-work/
9. https://theprint.in/opinion/female-labour-force-india-care-work/2929807/