It is a truth universally acknowledged that a parent working outside the home must have someone to take care of their child. In India, family structures have historically often filled this need, with fathers working outside the home, and mothers providing child care and elder care. However, this model is not conducive to India’s growing ambitions. If the country is to grow into a $5 trillion economy, women must be included. There are two specific ways to get here: women’s work, often care work, must be appropriately valued, and women must be adequately supported to participate in economic activity outside the home.
All women work, but not all of them get paid. Economist Claudia Goldin’s 2023 Nobel Prize-winning work demonstrates this across American history. India’s first national Time Use Survey released in 2020 by the National Statistical Office, finds that 81.2% of all women are engaged in unpaid domestic services, compared with 26.1% of men. It finds that men spend 42 hours on average on activities within the production boundary, i.e. what is traditionally counted as economic activity, whereas women spend 19 hours. However, women spend 10 times more time on household maintenance and care for children, the sick and the elderly — 34.6 hours versus 3.6 hours.
There are two implications for this: working women face the dreaded “double burden”, where working outside the home and contributing to family income does not come with a commensurate reduction in household responsibilities, and the care work that they do spend time on is not counted in the larger economic estimates, leaving us with exhausted women with lower leisure hours in a week than their male counterparts.
