Contemporary Discourses on Gender and Work: Feminist Perspectives and Economic Contributions

For a long time, the word “work” in economics referred almost exclusively to activities that earned a wage or generated a product for the market. Cooking meals, raising children, caring for elderly family members, fetching water, and tending to household livestock – none of this counted. This narrow definition had a profound consequence: it rendered the enormous economic contributions of women virtually invisible. Over the past few decades, feminist economists have mounted a powerful challenge to this view, arguing that unpaid labour is not just socially valuable but economically indispensable. Their work has reshaped how we think about gender, work, and the economy.

Why traditional economics ignored women’s work 🔗

Classical and neoclassical economics built their models around market transactions. If something did not have a price tag – if it was not bought or sold – it fell outside the boundary of what was considered “economic.” Feminist scholars have pointed out that economists like Simon Kuznets, while compiling national income accounts in the mid-twentieth century, deliberately excluded unpaid household production from GDP calculations. The reasoning was straightforward but deeply flawed: domestic tasks performed by women were treated as personal services, not economic output.

This had real-world consequences. Policies, budgets, and development plans were all designed around GDP figures that simply did not account for the work that kept families and communities functioning. Women who spent their entire day in productive activities – growing food, processing grain, managing household resources – were classified as “non-workers” in census data and labour force surveys.

The feminist economics challenge 🔗

Starting in the 1960s and gaining significant momentum through the 1970s and 1980s, feminist economists began pushing back against these conventions. Their argument was not merely philosophical. They brought data, fieldwork, and rigorous analysis to demonstrate that unpaid labour was the backbone of both household survival and broader economic systems.

Ester Boserup and women in development 🔗

Danish economist Ester Boserup published her groundbreaking book Woman’s Role in Economic Development in 1970. It was the first systematic investigation into how economic growth affected women across the developing world. Boserup examined the gender division of labour on farms, in factories, and in homes. She showed that women played central roles in agricultural production – particularly in Africa and Asia – but that modernisation and colonial policies often displaced them from productive roles they had traditionally held.

Boserup’s work was transformative because it argued that women’s contributions, both in and outside the home, were essential to national economies. Her research laid the intellectual foundation for what became known as the Women in Development (WID) framework. It also inspired the UN Decade for Women (1976-1985) and subsequent global policy attention to gender in economic planning.

Maria Mies and the politics of housewifisation 🔗

While Boserup focused on making women’s economic roles visible within development frameworks, German-born Marxist feminist scholar Maria Mies went deeper into the structural roots of women’s exploitation. In her influential 1986 work Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Mies traced how capitalism and patriarchy functioned as interconnected systems. She argued that the process of “housewifisation” – defining women primarily as housewives – was not a natural or ancient arrangement but a deliberate outcome of capitalist-patriarchal structures.

Mies conducted extensive fieldwork in India, including a well-known study of lace makers in Narsapur, Andhra Pradesh. She found that women who produced lace for global markets from their homes were classified as “housewives” rather than workers, which allowed middlemen and exporters to pay them extremely low wages. The label of “housewife” effectively concealed the fact that these women were engaged in commercial production. Mies’s concept of housewifisation became a key analytical tool for understanding how women’s labour is systematically devalued across both developed and developing economies.

Unpaid work: the numbers behind the invisibility 🔗

The scale of unpaid work globally is staggering. According to IMF research, women perform an average of 4.4 hours of unpaid work per day globally, compared to just 1.7 hours for men. The gap varies by country – it is relatively narrow in Scandinavian nations and extremely wide in parts of South Asia and the Middle East.

The economic value of this work is enormous. Estimates from the International Labour Organization and Oxfam suggest that women collectively perform approximately 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work every day worldwide, with an estimated value exceeding $10.8 trillion annually. Despite this, care work remains largely absent from national accounting systems.

The Indian context 🔗

The situation in India is particularly stark. The country’s Time Use Survey of 2019, conducted by the National Statistical Office, revealed that women spent approximately 299 minutes per day on unpaid domestic and caregiving tasks, while men spent only about 97 minutes. This three-to-one ratio reflects deeply entrenched social norms about who is responsible for household work.

What makes this even more significant is that India has one of the lowest female labour force participation rates (FLFP) in the world. Research published in academic journals has consistently argued that the burden of unpaid domestic work is a major reason why women are unable to enter or remain in the paid workforce. The patriarchal structure of the family pushes domestic labour onto women, confining many of them to home-based, poorly paid, and informal work – or excluding them from the labour market altogether.

Measurement itself is part of the problem. The National Sample Survey has been criticised for not adequately distinguishing between unpaid family workers and those engaged solely in domestic duties. This means that many women who are actually performing economically productive activities – on farms, in family enterprises, or in home-based production – get counted as “non-workers.”

The sexual division of labour: a persistent barrier 🔗

At the heart of these discussions is the concept of the sexual division of labour – the socially constructed assignment of different tasks to men and women. This division is not based on innate ability but on cultural norms, traditions, and power structures that have evolved over centuries.

Feminist scholars have described three broad stages in the evolution of this division. In the first stage, women are confined entirely to domestic and reproductive work. In the second, women begin entering paid employment but continue to carry the full burden of household responsibilities – the so-called “double burden.” In the third stage, both men and women attempt to integrate paid and unpaid work more equitably. Most societies, including India, are still struggling between the first and second stages.

The persistence of this division has concrete consequences. Women who spend the majority of their time on unpaid care work have less time for education, skill-building, rest, and paid employment. Feminist economist Jayati Ghosh has used the term “time poverty” to describe this condition – women are not just income-poor but time-poor, with little room to invest in their own development.

The wage gap and workplace disadvantages 🔗

Even when women do participate in the paid workforce, they face systemic disadvantages. The gender wage gap – the difference between what men and women earn for similar work – persists across almost every sector and every country. Women are disproportionately concentrated in low-paying, informal, and precarious forms of employment.

Studies on home-based work in India have shown that subcontracted work relies heavily on a gendered and fragmented labour force. Women working from home – making garments, rolling incense sticks, assembling products – often earn far below minimum wage. Their unpaid caregiving responsibilities at home directly subsidise the production process, as employers benefit from not having to provide workspace, equipment, or social security.

This intersection of paid and unpaid work creates a vicious cycle. Low wages reduce women’s bargaining power within households, which reinforces the expectation that they should prioritise domestic duties, which in turn limits their ability to seek better-paying jobs.

Recognise, reduce, redistribute: a feminist policy framework 🔗

Contemporary feminist economists have rallied around a framework often summarised as the “Three Rs” – Recognise, Reduce, and Redistribute.” This approach, advocated by scholars like Diane Elson and Nancy Folbre, calls for a comprehensive rethinking of how societies value and distribute care work.

Recognise means making unpaid work visible in economic data. Time Use Surveys are a critical tool here, and India’s 2019 survey was an important step. But recognition also means changing public attitudes – acknowledging that cooking, cleaning, and caring for dependents is real, productive work.

Reduce means investing in infrastructure and services that decrease the total amount of unpaid work required. Access to clean water, affordable cooking fuel, childcare facilities, and elder care services can dramatically reduce the hours women spend on domestic tasks. In India, for instance, women in rural areas spend significant time each day simply collecting firewood and water.

Redistribute means sharing care responsibilities more equally between men and women, and between families and the state. Policies like parental leave (not just maternity leave), flexible work arrangements, and public provision of care services all contribute to redistribution.

Why this matters for economic growth 🔗

The case for addressing unpaid work is not just about fairness – it is also about economic efficiency. When half the population is unable to fully participate in the workforce because of care responsibilities, societies lose out on talent, productivity, and growth potential. IMF research has noted that by not fully utilising women’s capabilities, economies are misallocating resources – directing skilled individuals toward low-productivity tasks at home instead of leveraging their potential in the marketplace.

Countries that have invested in reducing unpaid work burdens – through better infrastructure, affordable childcare, and equitable leave policies – have seen corresponding increases in female labour force participation. The link between public investment in care infrastructure and women’s economic empowerment is now well-established in development economics.

The continuing relevance of feminist economics 🔗

The questions raised by Boserup, Mies, and their successors are far from settled. Even today, national accounting systems in most countries do not fully integrate unpaid work into GDP calculations. Policy discussions about economic growth rarely centre the care economy. And the social norms that assign domestic responsibilities overwhelmingly to women remain deeply entrenched.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought some of these issues into sharper focus, as lockdowns dramatically increased the amount of unpaid care work in households – and women bore the brunt of it. School closures, the absence of domestic help, and the need to care for sick family members all fell disproportionately on women, pushing many out of the workforce entirely.

What feminist economics offers is not just a critique but a constructive alternative. It asks us to expand our definition of what counts as “the economy,” to value the work that sustains life and community, and to design policies that enable all individuals – regardless of gender – to participate fully in both productive and reproductive activities.

What do you think? Should unpaid domestic and care work be formally included in GDP calculations, and how might such a change affect policy priorities? In your own observation, has the distribution of household responsibilities between men and women shifted meaningfully in recent years, or do traditional patterns still dominate?

References

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0488-2
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ester_Boserup
3. https://academic.oup.com/book/46159/chapter/404962473
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Mies
5. https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2019/10/15/blog-the-economic-cost-of-devaluing-women-work
6. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/24556327211012843
7. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13545701.2023.2210586
8. https://gipe.ac.in/gendered-patterns-of-unpaid-care-work-distribution-in-india-an-empirical-exploration-from-first-large-scale-time-use-survey-2019/