Time Use Survey: Women Spent 20% of Their Time on Unpaid Care Work, Men Spent 2.6%

For over a decade since 2009, scholarship on women’s employment in India focussed on the puzzling trend of declining female labour force participation rate (FLFPR) despite a rise in women’s education levels, increasing age at marriage and general improvement in economic standards.

The rural FLFPR (all ages) declined from about 33% in 2004-05 to 18% in 2017-18. Over the last few years, we are witnessing an equally puzzling trend of a sharp rise, with the latest PLFS data for 2023-24 showing rural FLFPR back at about 36%. 

A disaggregated analysis shows that much of the recent increase is accounted for by rising self-employment, particularly in the category of ‘unpaid helpers in own enterprises’, indicating rural distress. The government however has been showcasing this rise in FLFPR as a reflection of the success of its efforts towards promoting women’s employment. 

At the same time, the government has been arguing for better capturing of women’s work through employment surveys, as stated in the Economic Survey 2024.

In January 2025, the Union labour minister Mansukh Mandaviya said that the definition of jobs should include women working within the households as well as self-employed persons. 

It is another matter that the labour force surveys in India already include all economic activity that women are involved in, whether self-employed or wage work, within the home or outside.  In these proclamations, many issues are getting conflated while the core problem of what is happening to women’s employment remains unclear.

Also read: Why Women’s Employment Is a Conundrum in India

Feminists for long have demanded that all work done by women, ‘productive’ as well as ‘reproductive’, must be recognised and valued. Almost all women in India are involved in some amount of unpaid domestic and caregiving work, irrespective of whether or not they are in employment. 

While such work is to be counted, the differentiation between work and employment is also important to take note of. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) classifications make this distinction clear, based on the resolutions of the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS), defining work as comprising “any activity performed by persons of any sex and age to produce goods or to provide services for use by others or for own use”. Employment on the other hand comprises “work performed for others in exchange for pay or profit”. While the burden of unpaid work is to be recognised, reduced and redistributed, in the case of employment, the objective is to make decent jobs available to more and more women.

In the context of misleading definitions and surveys which are not designed to capture women’s work in its entirety, time use surveys (TUS) are believed to give a relatively better idea of the continuum of women’s work. TUS records all activities performed by individuals during the previous day, in half-hour intervals, and then classifies these into major divisions such as employment related activities, production for own use, unpaid domestic and caregiving services and so on. 

While a pilot TUS was conducted in six states in India in 1998-99, the first national level TUS data is available for 2019. The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation has just released the factsheet from the second national TUS conducted in 2024. 

As expected, the TUS data in both rounds show that while fewer women participate in employment related activities compared to men, a much larger proportion of women participate in unpaid domestic work and caregiving services. 

Also read: Despite Fresh Data, We Still Don’t Know How Many Indians Are Poor

Further, the time spent on unpaid activities by women – which include production for own use, unpaid domestic services for household members, unpaid caregiving services for household members and unpaid volunteer work – totalled to 305 minutes in both years on an average and is almost six times more than men, who tallied 67 minutes in 2019 and 56 mins in 2024. 

In 2024, women spent 19.7% of the time in a day on unpaid domestic and care work compared to 2.6% by men. The average time spent per person in a day on paid and unpaid activities together in 2024 was 367 minutes for women compared to 307 minutes for males indicating that not only do women face a higher burden of unpaid work but that they also get less time for leisure and self-care activities. This aspect of time poverty faced by women due to their multiple work burdens has been highlighted by many. 

Corresponding to the trend shown in the employment surveys, there is an increase in women participating in employment and related activities from 18.4% in 2019 to 20.7% in 2024 and smaller increase in production of goods for own final use from 20.0% to 20.7%. However, these increases are less dramatic than the rise in FLFPR shown by the PLFS data. 

The press note released by the ministry states that, “Female participants aged 15-59 years in unpaid domestic services spent about 315 minutes during 2019 in those activities, which has come down to 305 minutes during 2024 signifying the shift from unpaid to paid activities.”  

Whether this small decline is indeed due to a shift to paid activities or just a redistribution of time between different kinds of unpaid activities will be clear when we have access to the entire data.

More granular data, once released, will also provide greater insights into the regional, caste, class and community-wise differences in the way time is spent across various activities. 

The TUS 2019 showed that women belonging to marginalised communities spent even higher amounts of time on unpaid domestic and care work as well as on production of goods for their own use. 

It is welcome that time use surveys have now become a routine part of India’s data system. An analysis of the full data would be useful towards developing a better understanding of women’s work. From the factsheet, it seems like not much has changed for women in these five years at least as far as the burden of unpaid household work is concerned.