Measuring Women’s Work: Standards and Challenges in Accounting for Unpaid Labor

When we talk about economic growth, we usually think of factories, offices, and markets. But what about the millions of hours spent cooking meals, caring for children, fetching water, and managing households? This work – overwhelmingly performed by women – keeps economies running, yet it rarely shows up in official statistics. The challenge of measuring unpaid labor is not just a technical problem; it is a deeply political one, tied to how societies value women’s contributions.

Why unpaid work matters for national economies 🔗

Every day, women across the country spend hours on domestic chores, childcare, and eldercare. According to the National Statistical Office’s Time Use Survey (2019), Indian women spend an average of nearly 5 hours per day on unpaid domestic work, compared to just about 1.5 hours for men. This gap is among the widest in the world.

Despite this enormous contribution, unpaid household work is excluded from the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The reasoning is rooted in how national accounting systems were originally designed – they were built to track market transactions, not the labour that happens inside homes. But this exclusion has real consequences. It makes women’s economic role invisible, distorts policy priorities, and reinforces the idea that caregiving is not “real” work.

The United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA) 🔗

The System of National Accounts (SNA) is the internationally agreed framework for measuring economic activity. Maintained by the United Nations and other international bodies, it provides the rules that countries follow when calculating GDP and other national income measures.

What the SNA includes and excludes 🔗

The SNA has evolved over the decades. The 1993 revision of the SNA was a landmark moment. It broadened the definition of economic production to include some forms of non-market work – such as subsistence agriculture, water collection, and the production of goods for own consumption. This was a significant step because it acknowledged that work done outside the formal market still contributes to economic output.

However, the 1993 SNA still drew a line. Unpaid domestic services – cooking, cleaning, childcare within one’s own household – remained outside the “production boundary.” The logic was that these services are difficult to value in monetary terms and are not exchanged in any market. Critics have long argued that this boundary is arbitrary and inherently biased against women’s work.

Satellite accounts: a partial solution 🔗

To address this gap, the SNA framework encourages countries to develop satellite accounts for household production. These are supplementary accounts that sit alongside the main GDP figures and attempt to place a monetary value on unpaid domestic work. Countries like the United Kingdom and Canada have developed such accounts, estimating that unpaid household work could add anywhere from 10% to 40% to official GDP figures.

In India, efforts to create satellite accounts for unpaid work are still in early stages. The Time Use Survey of 2019 was a crucial data-collection step, but translating that data into a formal satellite account requires sustained institutional commitment and methodological clarity.

The feminist push for recognizing household labor 🔗

The demand to count women’s unpaid work is not new. It has deep roots in feminist economics and activism that stretch back several decades.

The “Wages for Housework” movement 🔗

In the 1970s, the International Wages for Housework Campaign, led by scholars like Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, argued that capitalism depends on the unpaid reproductive labour of women. Their central claim was powerful: housework is not a personal service to the family but a form of production that subsidises employers and the state. By keeping this labour unwaged, economies effectively shift the cost of sustaining the workforce onto women.

This movement sparked intense debate. Some feminists worried that paying for housework would further trap women in domestic roles. Others saw it as a necessary step toward economic justice. Regardless of where one stood, the campaign succeeded in placing unpaid work firmly on the global policy agenda.

Global milestones in recognizing unpaid work 🔗

The Beijing Platform for Action (1995) explicitly called on governments to measure and value unpaid work and reflect it in satellite or supplementary accounts. This was a significant international commitment. The platform recognised that until unpaid work is visible in economic data, policies will continue to overlook the needs of those who perform it.

More recently, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5, which focuses on gender equality, includes Target 5.4 – a commitment to recognise and value unpaid care and domestic work. This target calls for the provision of public services, infrastructure, and social protection policies, as well as the promotion of shared responsibility within households. It is a clear acknowledgment at the global level that unpaid work is a development issue, not merely a private concern.

How do you actually measure unpaid work? 🔗

Measuring something that happens outside formal markets, without wages or receipts, is inherently difficult. Over the years, economists and statisticians have developed several approaches.

Time Use Surveys 🔗

Time Use Surveys (TUS) are the primary tool. They ask individuals to record how they spend their time over a 24-hour period, capturing activities like cooking, cleaning, childcare, and commuting. The Indian TUS of 2019 covered over 4.5 lakh households and provided the first comprehensive national picture of how men and women allocate their time across different activities.

The data confirmed what many already knew: women bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid work across all income groups, regions, and social categories. But having official, large-scale data makes it possible to build policies on evidence rather than assumptions.

Valuation methods 🔗

Once time-use data is collected, the next challenge is putting a monetary value on unpaid work. There are broadly two approaches:

Replacement cost method: This estimates what it would cost to hire someone to perform the same tasks. For example, if a woman spends 4 hours cooking and cleaning, the value is calculated based on what a paid domestic worker would charge for those hours.

Opportunity cost method: This looks at what the person could have earned if they had spent those hours in paid employment instead. This method often produces higher estimates because it reflects the foregone wages of educated women who leave the workforce to manage households.

Both methods have limitations. The replacement cost method may undervalue work by pegging it to low-paid domestic worker wages. The opportunity cost method can vary wildly depending on the individual’s education and skill level. Yet despite these imperfections, valuation exercises are essential for making the invisible visible.

Employment guarantee programs and the unpaid work burden 🔗

One of the most practical ways to address the unpaid work burden is through well-designed public employment programs. These programs can serve a dual purpose: they create paid work opportunities for women while simultaneously redistributing some of the costs of care and reproduction.

MGNREGA: potential and limitations 🔗

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is one of the largest employment guarantee programs in the world. It guarantees 100 days of wage employment per year to every rural household. Since its inception, women have constituted a significant share of MGNREGA workers – in several states, female participation has exceeded 50%.

For many women, MGNREGA provides their first experience of earning an independent income. This has tangible effects: studies have shown links between women’s MGNREGA participation and improvements in household bargaining power, nutritional outcomes for children, and reduced vulnerability to domestic violence.

However, challenges remain. Wages are often delayed. Crèche facilities mandated by the Act for children of workers are frequently unavailable. And the types of work offered – digging trenches, building roads – do not always account for women’s time constraints or physical circumstances. When a woman must still return home to cook, clean, and care for dependents after a day of manual labour, the employment guarantee can add to her total work burden rather than reducing it.

Designing programs that truly transform 🔗

For employment programs to meaningfully reduce the unpaid work burden, they need to be designed with gender at the centre. This means several things:

Provision of care infrastructure: Functional crèches, anganwadis, and eldercare services at or near worksites can free women from the impossible choice between earning and caring.

Flexible work arrangements: Allowing flexible hours or part-time participation acknowledges that women’s time is already heavily committed.

Expanding the definition of “work”: Some advocates argue that care work itself should be eligible for wages under employment guarantee schemes. If cooking mid-day meals for a community centre counts as employment, why shouldn’t similar work at home?

Promoting shared responsibility: Programs can include awareness components that encourage men to take on a greater share of domestic responsibilities. Without shifts in household norms, women will continue to shoulder a “double burden” of paid and unpaid work.

When these elements come together, employment programs can do more than provide income. They can begin to restructure the gendered division of labour itself, creating space for women to participate in public and economic life on more equal terms.

The road ahead: from measurement to policy change 🔗

Measuring unpaid work is not an end in itself. The real goal is to use that data to reshape policies, budgets, and social norms. A few key steps stand out.

First, institutionalising Time Use Surveys as a regular exercise – not a one-off – would ensure that data on unpaid work stays current and feeds into planning processes. Second, developing a formal satellite account for household production would make the economic value of unpaid work visible to policymakers and the public alike. Third, gender-responsive budgeting – which examines how government spending affects men and women differently – can ensure that public investments in infrastructure, healthcare, and childcare are designed to reduce women’s unpaid work burden.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) has consistently emphasised that investing in the care economy is not just a matter of gender justice – it is smart economics. Better care infrastructure creates jobs, improves productivity, and enables higher female labour force participation, which in turn drives economic growth.

What do you think? 🔗

If unpaid domestic work were included in GDP calculations, how might that change the way governments allocate resources and design welfare programs? And in your own experience, do you see the division of household labour shifting across generations, or does the traditional pattern still hold strong?

References

1. https://www.nsso.gov.in
2. https://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/sna.asp
3. https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/satelliteaccounts
4. https://carindia.org/feminist-economics-unpaid-work/
5. https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/
6. https://mospi.gov.in/time-use-survey
7. https://nrega.nic.in/MGNREGA_new/Nrega_home.aspx
8. https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/care-economy/lang–en/index.htm