Tracking Women’s Unpaid Contributions: A Comparative Study Using India’s Time Use Surveys, 1998–2024

Abstract

Unpaid domestic and care giving work by women is still an economic and societal staple in India, but it has always been miscalculated and undervalued. Such unpaid work has been undertaken predominantly by women, largely due to their constrained position in the labour market and their limited participation in formal market production. To bring this ‘invisible labour’ into clearer focus, the National Statistical Office (NSO) conducts Time Use Surveys. These surveys provide crucial empirical evidence for understanding the scale, value and socioeconomic implications of women’s unpaid work within the broader development discourse. This study examines the extent and patterns of unpaid domestic and care work performed by women in India using data from the Pilot Time Use Survey (1998–1999), the Time Use Survey (2019), and the Time Use Survey (2024). It offers a comprehensive analysis of long-term trends in women’s time allocation and highlights variations across different socioeconomic dimensions. The findings highlight the persistent burden of unpaid work on women and underscore the need for policies that recognize, reduce, and redistribute unpaid care work to support gender-equitable economic participation. The analysis shows that Indian women regularly dedicate an extremely huge proportion of their time to unpaid household chores - about 5 hours a day - throughout the 26 years period, and only slightly reduced over the period. Women have never been paid to be caregivers, and in reality, the burden of unpaid caregiving has increased over the past few years with women dedicating more time to care work in 2024 than they spent in 2019.