Women and the economy
Work That Was Never Work
India now measures, to the minute, how long women spend cooking, cleaning and caring. It has measured this twice. The boundary that keeps those minutes out of the national accounts has not moved, and the measurement was never intended to move it.
On 25 February 2025 the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation released the results of the second all-India Time Use Survey, covering January to December 2024. Among persons aged six and above, women spent 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services for their households and men spent 88. In the first such survey, for 2019, the figures were 299 and 97.1
Five years, ten minutes.
Caregiving moved the other way. Women aged six and above spent 137 minutes a day on it in 2024 against 134 in 2019, while men went from 76 to 75. Among those aged fifteen to fifty-nine, 41 per cent of women took part in caregiving on a given day against 21.4 per cent of men, and the women who did spent 140 minutes to the men's 74.1
The boundary
These minutes are counted and they are not counted, and the distinction between the two senses is the whole subject.
National accounts are built on a production boundary set by the System of National Accounts, the international standard India follows. Goods produced within a household for its own consumption fall inside it: if a family grows grain and eats it, that is production, and it enters gross domestic product at an imputed value. Services produced within a household for its own consumption fall outside it. Cooking the grain does not enter. Nor does cleaning, childcare, fetching water, collecting fuel, or nursing an elderly parent.
The Time Use Survey classifies activities by exactly this line, and reports participation on both sides of it.
In 2024, among persons aged fifteen to fifty-nine, 79.2 per cent of men and 43.4 per cent of women took part in production that counts toward the national accounts. In production that does not count, the figures were 45 per cent of men and 93.9 per cent of women.1 Nine women in ten spend part of their day producing something the accounts are constructed to exclude.
The asymmetry inside that boundary is worth dwelling on, because it is not intuitive and it does real work. A woman who walks to a handpump and carries water home is producing a good for own use, and her labour is inside the accounts. The same woman heating that water and washing with it is producing a service for own use, and her labour is outside them. Nothing about the effort, the skill or the necessity distinguishes the two. What distinguishes them is that a good can in principle be bought and sold in a form the accounts already price, and a service performed for one's own household cannot be observed in any market transaction. The boundary tracks the reach of the price system, not the reach of work.
The exclusion is not an oversight and the arguments for it are real. Imputing a value to household services requires a wage to impute at, and the candidates give very different answers: the wage a domestic worker would command, the wage the person could earn in their best alternative employment, or something else again. The choice would move measured output by a large margin and would make international comparison harder. Adding a large imputed component to GDP also degrades its usefulness as a measure of monetised activity, which is what most macroeconomic policy operates on.
None of that is an argument for not measuring the hours. It is an argument about what to do with them once measured, and India has now measured them twice.
There is a further consequence for how women's economic position is described, and it connects to the employment statistics. The labour force survey counts a woman as employed under usual status if she worked thirty days in a year, including unpaid work in a household enterprise. Female labour force participation on that measure rose from 23.3 per cent in 2017-18 to 41.7 per cent in 2023-24. The time use survey, asking a different question about the same population, finds that 93.9 per cent of women aged fifteen to fifty-nine were engaged on a given day in production the accounts exclude. Both statements are correct. They describe the same women, sorted by two different definitions of work, and the gap between 41.7 and 93.9 is a measure of how much depends on which definition is being used.
How the work disappeared from the count
The disappearance was gradual and it happened through definitions rather than through any decision to disregard women's labour.
The Committee on the Status of Women in India, reporting in December 1974, drew attention to a figure from the census volumes that had attracted little notice. Women had been 34.44 per cent of the recorded workforce in 1911 and were 17.35 per cent in 1971.2 Part of that halving reflected real displacement, as women were pushed out of household manufacture. Part of it was the product of successive changes in what the census counted as economic activity, changes that fell hardest on work that was unpaid, seasonal, home-based or performed alongside domestic duties, which is to say on the characteristic pattern of women's work.
The census kept narrowing. In 1961 the definition of a worker was relatively wide. In 1971 it was tightened. From 1981 the census distinguished main workers from marginal workers by a threshold of days worked in the year, so that a woman who worked her family's land for two months and kept house for ten was classified by the shorter activity only if it met the threshold.
Nothing in the field changed on the day a definition was revised. The women were doing what they had been doing. The category moved.
The concern is older than the republic. At the end of the 1930s the National Planning Committee, with K.T. Shah as its general secretary, appointed a sub-committee on Woman's Role in Planned Economy under Lakshmibai Rajwade, a physician trained at Grant Medical College who had presided over the All India Women's Conference. Its report, published in 1947, took the position that a planned economy had to reckon with what women did inside the household as well as outside it.3 The report was not acted on, and the census definitions moved in the opposite direction for the next three decades.
What a time use survey can and cannot do
The instrument arrived late. The Central Statistical Organisation ran a pilot time use survey in six states in 1998-99. The first all-India survey was conducted in 2019 and published in 2020; the second covered 2024 and was published in 2025. Both use the international classification for time use statistics adopted in 2016, and both collect a twenty-four hour diary from each selected respondent.
Three limits are worth stating plainly, because the numbers are quoted without them.
The first is simultaneity. A woman minding a child while cooking while supervising homework is performing three activities in one hour, and a diary that assigns each minute to a primary activity records one of them. Time use surveys generally record a secondary activity as well, but the headline totals are built on the primary, so the more activities are stacked, the more the method understates.
The second is that a minute is not a unit of effort or of value. Two hundred and eighty-nine minutes of domestic work tells you duration, not intensity, not whether the work was done under a working fan or over a smoky chulha, not whether water had to be carried. In 2024, 24.6 per cent of the rural population aged fifteen to fifty-nine spent an average of 121 minutes a day producing goods for their own use, an activity that includes fetching water and collecting firewood, and which sits inside the production boundary while cooking sits outside it.1
The third is that a five-year interval is too coarse to attribute change. Women's participation in employment and related activities among those aged fifteen to fifty-nine rose from 21.8 per cent in 2019 to about 25 per cent in 2024, and unpaid domestic time fell by ten minutes. The ministry read the two together as a shift from unpaid to paid activity. That reading is plausible and the survey cannot establish it, since the same pair of movements is consistent with a partial substitution, with changes in household composition, or with appliance ownership.
A cost of this is that the household appears in the accounts as a place where income is spent and almost never as a place where anything is produced. Policy follows the accounts. A road, a factory and a fertiliser subsidy are all interventions in measured output; a creche, a piped connection and a gas cylinder are treated as welfare expenditure, on the reasoning that they raise well-being rather than production. On the time use evidence, the second group also reallocates several hours a day of labour, and the state has no way of recording that as an economic return because the labour freed was never in the accounts to begin with.
The one thing the numbers settle
What the two surveys do establish, beyond argument about definitions, is the size of the gap and its persistence.
Women aged fifteen to fifty-nine spent 305 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services in 2024 against 315 in 2019. Men's contribution fell rather than rose, from 97 minutes to 88 across all ages. Whatever else has changed in the Indian household in the last five years, the division of the work inside it has not, and the direction of the small movement that did occur was toward women doing slightly less of it because they were doing more paid work, not because anyone else was doing more of it.
There is no proposal before the government to bring these hours into the national accounts, and there is a respectable case that they should not be. The change that measurement makes possible is different and more ordinary. Once the hours are in an official publication, a state that wants to reduce them can be asked whether piped water, cooking gas, creches or elder care are doing so, and the answer can be checked against the next survey rather than asserted.
The next one is due around 2029, on the pattern so far. It will show whether ten minutes in five years was a floor or a beginning.
- National Statistics Office, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Time Use Survey 2024 (January to December 2024), press note of 25 February 2025 and subsequent release of 28 March 2025; and Time Use Survey 2019. Figures for unpaid domestic services and caregiving are for persons aged six and above unless the age group fifteen to fifty-nine is stated. Participation in SNA and non-SNA production is for persons aged fifteen to fifty-nine. ↩
- Committee on the Status of Women in India, Towards Equality (Ministry of Education and Social Welfare, 1974), on women's share of the recorded workforce falling from 34.44 per cent in 1911 to 17.35 per cent in 1971. ↩
- Sub-committee on Woman's Role in Planned Economy, National Planning Committee, chaired by Lakshmibai Rajwade; report published in 1947. ↩