How To Treat Unpaid Work

Context: Women’s unpaid domestic work contributes to overall well-being at the household and national level, yet it is invisible in the national database and policies.

Nature of unpaid domestic work

• Repetitive, boring and frequently drudgery: A 24-hour job without remuneration, promotions or retirement benefits.
• Restricts opportunities for women: In the economy and in life. 
• Imposed patriarchal norms: Women do this job not necessarily because they like it or are efficient in it, but because it is imposed on them by patriarchal norms.

Challenges in recognising unpaid domestic work

• Recent development: Recognition by political parties and demand for wages for housewives.
• Implementation challenges: 
  • Complexities in the calculation of amounts.
  • Affordability of government.
  • Reluctance of women to enter the labour market.
  • Confirms unpaid work as women’s work only.

Way forward

• Recognise unpaid domestic work in the national database: Time-use survey and the data be used in national policies. 
• Relieve women’s burden of unpaid work by: 
  • Improving technology: E.g. Better fuel for cooking. 
  • Better infrastructure: E.g. water at the doorstep. 
  • Shifting some unpaid work to the mainstream economy: E.g. childcare, care of the disabled, and care of the chronically sick.
  • By making basic services accessible to women: E.g. Health and transportation. 
  • Redistribute work between men and women: Provide incentives and disincentives, E.g. Mandatory training of men in housework, childcare, financial incentives etc. 
• Expand the purview of economics: by accepting the household as a sector of the economy and integrating unpaid domestic work with mainstream economy and policies.