The invisible labour: Women's unpaid domestic work totals 1,640 crore hours daily worldwide

If all the ladies doing their household chores for their family are paid for their job, then the amount paid to them would be equivalent to about 7.5 per cent of India's GDP, according to State Bank of India's latest report. Whereas, a similar report released by International Labour Organisation said that all the ladies of 64 countries across the world work for 1640 crore hours without any pay on a daily basis, reports Live Hindustan.

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Coming back to SBI's Ecowrap report, it shed light upon how the unpaid nature of the domestic work performed mainly by women, places it outside the realm of economic production as measured by the government. Moreover, the unpaid work also remains out of the purview of economic policy.

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The report finds it important to comprehend the nature of the unpaid work done by the women to understand their status in the labour market. It also carries immense importance in terms of calculating women's work participation rate in the economy.

“Therefore, the objective of our analysis is to examine the magnitude of unpaid domestic work status of women in India,” says report.

According to the analyses, the average working hour of women stands at 7.2 hours/day. The analysis has used the data from a National Statistical Survey report for January-December 2019. The data is based on domestic and care giving services provided by ladies in their family.

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“As per data, the average time (in minutes) spent in a day per participant of age 6 years and above is around 432 minutes (or 7.2 hours),” the SBI report says.

The SBI research has assumed a monthly income of ₹5,000 for rural women and ₹8,000 for urban women, which means they have taken it as the wage which these ladies would have received had they worked for 8 hours in a day. There has also an additional assumption that 5% of these women in rural and 30% in urban areas are working for wages in the formal set-up. In its analysis, the report has indicated that "the total contribution of unpaid women to the economy is around ₹22.7 lakh crore (rural: ₹14.7 lakh crore and urban: ₹8.0 lakh crore) which is almost 7.5 per cent of India’s GDP.”