Redefining Work: A Holistic Approach to Valuing Women’s Labour

Imagine a woman’s day. Let’s call her Priya. She wakes up at 5 AM to collect water, clean the house, prepare breakfast, and get her children ready for school. She then spends a few hours helping on the small family plot, tending to vegetables they will later eat. After that, she fetches firewood, cooks lunch, helps her children with their homework, manages the household budget, and prepares dinner. Her husband, who has a 9-to-5 job at a nearby factory, is considered the family’s sole “breadwinner.” When asked, Priya, like millions of women, might even say she “doesn’t work.” This isn’t just a personal story; it’s a massive economic blind spot. For decades, our official definitions of “work” have been so narrow that they’ve essentially erased the vast economic contributions of women. This invisibility isn’t just unfair; it’s dangerous. It traps women in a vicious circle of devaluation, making them invisible to policymakers, economists, and political systems. It’s long past time we fixed our broken ruler and adopted a holistic approach to truly value women’s labour.

The vicious circle of devalued labour 🔗

When a significant portion of a person’s daily activity is not recognized as “work,” it doesn’t just disappear; it becomes a structural part of inequality. This is the heart of the vicious circle of devalued labour. It begins with a simple, flawed assumption: work is what you get paid for. This narrow definition, historically centered on male patterns of formal employment, automatically consigns most of women’s activities-especially domestic chores, caregiving, and subsistence farming-to the realm of “non-work.”

This institutional failure to recognize women’s multiple activities has profound consequences. Economically, it renders their contributions invisible in national accounting. The System of National Accounts (SNA), the international standard for measuring economic activity, largely excludes unpaid domestic and care work. This means that the cooking, cleaning, and childcare that form the very foundation of our society-work that would cost a significant amount to purchase on the market-doesn’t count toward the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This invisible, unpaid care work acts as a massive, unacknowledged subsidy to the “real” economy.

This economic invisibility translates directly into political marginalization. Policymakers, planners, and politicians rely on data to make decisions. When the data tells them that women have a low “work participation rate,” the logical (but wrong) conclusion is that they are not economically active. As a result, policies are not designed for them. Think about it:

• Infrastructure: If fetching water and fuel isn’t “work,” why invest public funds in clean water taps or subsidized cooking gas to reduce this burden?
• Social Security: If a woman is “just a housewife,” she isn’t eligible for pensions, healthcare, or other benefits tied to employment.
• Labour Laws: If home-based production (like weaving or food processing) isn’t seen as a “real job,” it remains in the informal sector, ripe for exploitation with no minimum wage, no safe working conditions, and no collective bargaining power.

This marginalization in policymaking solidifies women’s exploitation. Lacking economic independence and recognition, they have less power within their households and in their communities. Their needs are sidelined in development projects, and their voices are absent from political processes. They are trapped. Their work is unrecognized, so they are not valued. Because they are not valued, their work remains unrecognized. This is the cycle we must break.

The push for a holistic definition 🔗

The good news is that this flawed system has faced a powerful, decades-long challenge. The push to redefine work, moving from a narrow, market-based concept to a holistic one, has been a central project for feminist scholars, economists, and international human rights advocates for a long time.

The feminist debates that sparked a revolution 🔗

Starting in the 1970s, feminist economists began to systematically dismantle the gender-blind assumptions of mainstream economics. They argued that by focusing only on market production, economics was ignoring the entire “care economy”-the sphere of human activity that reproduces the labour force and maintains social well-being. They pointed out the absurdity of a system where a man paid to care for a child is a “worker,” but a woman doing the exact same thing for her own child is “inactive.”

This critique highlighted a fundamental problem: a critical lack of gender analysis and sex-disaggregated data. The systems we used to measure our economies were designed without considering gender. Surveys often only interviewed the (usually male) “head of household” and asked leading questions like “What is your primary occupation?” Such questions were guaranteed to miss the sporadic, seasonal, and multi-tasking nature of women’s work.

The United Nations and international interventions 🔗

These academic and activist debates gained significant international traction, particularly during the UN Decade for Women (1976-1985). This period marked a turning point, forcing global institutions to confront the statistical invisibility of women. The UN and its various agencies began to accept that the inadequacy of current data systems wasn’t just a technical problem-it was a political one that actively reinforced gender inequality.

This pressure led to a wider acceptance of the urgent need to redefine work. It was no longer a fringe feminist demand but a prerequisite for accurate economic planning and sustainable development. If we truly wanted to reduce poverty, improve health, and build stable societies, we first had to *see* and *value* the work that women were already doing.

Key aspects of a redefined concept of work 🔗

So, what does a “holistic” definition of work actually look like? It’s not about simply adding a few new job titles. It’s about fundamentally re-engineering our understanding of economic contribution. This new framework rests on three essential pillars.

1. Broadening definitions to include women-specific occupations 🔗

First, the definition must expand beyond formal, paid employment. It must explicitly include the vast range of activities predominantly performed by women, especially in rural and developing economies. This includes:

• Subsistence production: Growing food, raising livestock, and kitchen gardening for family consumption.
• Processing primary goods: Activities like threshing grain, milling flour, preserving food (pickling, drying), and processing milk into ghee or curd.
• Resource collection: The daily, time-consuming tasks of gathering firewood, fetching water, and collecting fodder for animals.
• Home-based production: Manufacturing goods at home, such as weaving textiles, making pottery, or rolling bidis, even if it’s for informal sale or barter.

By labeling these as “economic activities,” we transform them from “domestic duties” into “work.”

2. Covering the cultural and seasonal nature of work 🔗

Second, the concept of work must become more flexible. The traditional 9-to-5, year-round model doesn’t apply to much of the world’s labour. Women’s work, in particular, is often seasonal (like planting and harvesting in agriculture), sporadic (fitting tasks around childcare), and multi-faceted (juggling several tasks at once).

Data collection methods must adapt. Instead of asking “Do you work?”, surveys must ask activity-based questions like, “What did you do in the last week?” or “In the last year, did you engage in…?” This approach also helps overcome mitigating cultural biases, where it might be considered shameful for a family to admit that its women “have” to work. Focusing on *activities* rather than *status* captures a much more accurate picture.

3. Creating mechanisms to estimate unpaid work 🔗

Finally, and most radically, we must find ways to measure the economic value of unpaid care and domestic work. This is the final frontier of economic visibility. This work-cooking, cleaning, childcare, elder care-is undeniably productive. If families had to pay for these services, the cost would be astronomical.

The primary tool for this is the Time Use Survey (TUS). Unlike traditional employment surveys, a TUS tracks what people do 24 hours a day, often in 15-minute intervals. When India conducted its first comprehensive Time Use Survey in 2019, the results were staggering. It found that, on average, Indian women spend 299 minutes (nearly 5 hours) a day on unpaid domestic services, compared to just 97 minutes for men. This data makes the invisible subsidy quantifiable, providing a powerful tool for advocating policy change.

Making the invisible visible: national and international measures 🔗

This conceptual shift from theory to practice is a slow but steady process. We can see tangible changes happening at both the national and international levels, as institutions begin to update their rules and definitions.

National steps: Rectifying definitions in the Indian Census 🔗

The Census of India provides a powerful case study. For decades, it massively undercounted women’s work. The 1981 Census, for example, recorded a female work participation rate of only 14%. Activists and scholars argued this was a statistical fiction.

In response, significant changes were made for the 1991 Census.

• The definition of “economic activity” was expanded to explicitly include work on a family farm or in a family enterprise, even if unpaid.
• Enumerators were given special training to probe for women’s work, asking specific questions like, “Did you help in the fields?” or “Did you sell any milk, eggs, or homemade goods?”

The results were immediate. The female work participation rate “jumped” to 22.3%-not because more women suddenly started working, but because the census finally started *seeing* the work they had been doing all along. While still an undercount (as highlighted by organizations like the World Bank), this shift demonstrated that how you define and measure work changes everything.

International efforts: The ILO and FAO set new standards 🔗

At the international level, specialized agencies have been crucial in setting new global standards. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has been a leader. In 1985, and more comprehensively in 2013 at the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians, the ILO adopted a new resolution that radically updated the definition of work.

This new framework officially recognizes five forms of work:

1. Own-use production work (subsistence).
2. Employment (work for pay or profit).
3. Unpaid trainee work.
4. Volunteer work.
5. Unpaid household services (the care economy).

By separating these categories, the ILO framework allows statisticians to measure *all* productive activities, including the unpaid care work previously left out, without lumping them all in with “employment.”

Similarly, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), recognizing that women are the backbone of global agriculture, updated its guidelines for agricultural censuses. It now pushes for data to be collected on the specific tasks performed by women, rather than just identifying a single (male) “holder” of the land. This helps reveal women’s central role in food production.

Redefining work is not just a semantic game for academics. It is a fundamental act of recognition. It is the first and most critical step toward building an economy that is fair, accurate, and truly serves everyone. By making women’s labour visible, we give policymakers the data they need to create supportive infrastructure, social security nets, and legal protections. We dismantle the vicious circle of devaluation and replace it with a virtuous cycle of recognition, empowerment, and equitable development.

What do you think? In your own family or community, what is the most significant “invisible” work you see being done, and by whom? If you were a policymaker, what one new rule or program would you create to recognize and support this unpaid labour?

References

1. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw63/recognition-and-value-of-unpaid-care-work
2. https://mospi.gov.in/web/mospi/time-use-survey
3. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/gender/publication/female-labor-force-participation-in-india