Leading IT entrepreneur Narayana Murthy had recently drawn flak by suggesting 70-hour workweeks. But perhaps he had not taken a close look at an average woman’s workday in India even nearly eight decades after independence. He could have been stunned.
We are talking about an average woman’s workday, because all women are working women. This remains invisible, something that has not changed since independence or the empowerment of women in several areas, because much of women’s work is unpaid. In other areas of development, it is easier to measure progress or its lack as various data are available, even if imperfectly; but it is almost impossible to measure women’s unpaid work, household management and caring for family members, because though the bedrock of an economy, which makes possible other forms of work, this itself remains invisible.
Therefore, like so much of women’s lives, it has no history. An inconvenient consideration for patriarchy, it is as if it almost did not exist. What does not exist does not lead to policy. Only in the recent decades has it been entering public discourse, since the 80s particularly, from when women began to enter the workforce in significant ways in India as well.
Brajalata Dalui has an extraordinary daily schedule
On a hot April day this year, I was on my way to Bajberai village in Kulpi block in Sundarban at the southern fringe of West Bengal, India. It was about 10am, but already the sun appeared to have drained all life around into exhaustion. Sundarban, the delta bordering the Bay of Bengal, is affected severely by sea level rise, extreme weather events and other aspects of climate change. It is also becoming hotter by the year.
I was to meet Brajalata Dalui, 38, a farmer. She was not at home, as she had to go to the health centre for suddenly feeling ill, and was rushing back home. She is one of the leading members in a local collective of about 2,000 farmers. About 80 per cent of the collective are women.
Brajalata was always active in the 4 bighas of land that she cultivates with her husband, but Cyclone Amphan in 2020, which devastated Sundarban, changed everything for her family, too. Kulpi block is close to Sagar block and the Bay of Bengal and bore the full fury of Amphan. Huge cyclones, linked with climate change, have become far more regular events in Sundarban than they were even two decades earlier.
Following Amphan, after which the family’s agricultural land was flooded with saline water and could not be cultivated, Brajalata’s husband migrated for work outside Sundarban. After every cyclone Sundarban experiences an exodus of a mostly male population in search of livelihood. In her husband’s absence, Brajalata, like so many women in Sundarban and elsewhere, took up the responsibility of all the family work, including agriculture.
She has an extraordinary daily schedule.
She wakes up at the crack of dawn, or earlier, goes to the fields early morning where she cultivates rice and vegetables, goes to the market to sell the vegetables, gets her two young daughters ready for school, prepares food for them, drops the younger daughter to school, finishes cooking lunch, does all the household work, picks her younger daughter up from school, organises lunch, goes to the fields early evening and cooks and does household work in the evening till late. She sleeps for 4-5 hours every day, if even that. It is no wonder that she needs to see a doctor at 10am.
Yet she is a successful farmer. She used organic products as part of the farmers’ collective to rid her land of salinity. It has given her a sense of agency, confidence and some financial empowerment.
Climate change magnifying women’s workload
This structural inequality has far-reaching consequences: it helps to perpetuate unfair gender roles and inequity even as it places the burden of managing the new environment at home, including the effects of climate change, on the women.
Climate change is affecting the domestic situation in increasingly new ways; be it sudden extreme weather events such as cyclones, droughts or floods, or gradual change like erosion triggered by a steady sea-level rise that swallows homes, and ever-increasing temperatures.
Climate change helps to exacerbate existing problems, including the gender gap in unpaid work.
Hijacked working hours for women
Recent research based on extensive data from the government of India points at the scale and severity of the problem. The research, carried out by the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, and published in March 2024 in the Journal of Family and Economic Issues, uses data obtained from the Time Use Survey (2019) of India conducted by the National Statistical Office. The study is based on 445,299 individuals, with almost an equal number of men and women.
Across India, even as women and girls aged six years and above spend 301 minutes (every day) on unpaid domestic work, men devote a mere 98 minutes to the same, according to the data. Married women fare the worst: married working-age women spend 331 minutes per day on unpaid domestic work.
It is estimated that about 70 per cent of the women in the labour force in the country work in agriculture. These farmers, like Brajalata, come back from work in the fields to begin work at home. Women from poorer families spend more time on unpaid domestic work than women from affluent homes; and so do rural women compared to their urban counterparts.
According to the Time Use Survey (2024), the situation has improved marginally for women recently with the time spent by women in unpaid domestic work having dropped to 305 minutes per day in 2024 from 315 minutes in 2019. The time men spent on unpaid work has dropped by 10 minutes at 88 minutes per day, too, keeping the gender gap unchanged.
Though time spent by women on unpaid work varies across categories, it is significant across class, caste, communities, religious groups and economic status. Brajalata’s workday may be different, but her workhours are shared by Rumena Pal, a beauty parlour employee in Kolkata, who leaves home at 8am after cooking, drops her child home, reaches home at 9pm and cooks again. A 70-plus paediatrician at a reputed hospital wakes up at 5am to look after her husband and the household before she leaves for the hospital. The Mumbai-based country head of a UK firm, who has a 15-year-old daughter, sleeps for 4-5 hours every day at the most.
Nothing official about women unpaid work schedule
One wonders how to interpret the almost stagnant unpaid work figures for women in conjunction with the Indian government figures that claim female labour force participation (FLFP) in the country has increased by leaps and bounds since 2017-18, to close to double in last five years.
The figure was 23.3 percent in 2017-18; in 2023-24 it has increased to 41.7 percent.
This is very encouraging, but it also means that more women are overworked than earlier.
Policy needs to embrace women’s unpaid work
State policy needs to address the issue of unpaid gendered work. Realising women’s workforce potential is not possible without addressing women’s work at home. Addressing the matter also makes good financial sense.
According to The Economic Survey 2024, women’s unpaid care work contributes 3.1% to GDP, even as men’s unpaid work contributes 0.4%. It has been projected that if women paid less time on unpaid work, India’s GDP could go up to $300 billion.
One also wonders about the implication of the lengthening workdays on the mental and physical health of women, from Brajalata Dalui to a corporate leader.
Chandrima S. Bhattacharya is a journalist from Kolkata. She writes on gender, environment, culture and Kolkata.