The Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen, released in 2021, struck a chord with most women who watched it. The protagonist in the film slogs in the kitchen all day with no appreciation and towards the end decides to break the shackles of domestic work to pursue her dreams.
Along with various tasks related to maintaining the household, preparation of meals remains largely a feminised activity even though there are more men venturing out as chefs as a career path. Daily meal preparations for the family continue to remain a woman’s task, across class, caste and region. The drudgery of this task and how much it affects women’s ability to take on other occupations, of course, varies by caste, class and location. The more privileged are also able to outsource this to other women from lower income backgrounds who work as domestic workers.
India conducted its first national Time Use Survey in 2019. This survey gives information on time spent on various activities by all members of the respondents’ households, aged above six years, during the previous 24 hours in half-hour slots. Based on this, using the International Classification of Activities for Time Use Statistics (ICATUS) 2016, the activities that people spend time on are classified in to nine main divisions. Two of these – unpaid domestic services for household members and unpaid caregiving services for household members are highly gendered.
On average, 28% men and 82% women over six years of age in rural areas and 23% men and 79% women in urban areas participate in unpaid domestic services for household members. The time spent by those who participate also varies greatly with women participants spending on average 301 minutes a day in rural areas and 293 minutes a day in urban areas on unpaid domestic services, while men participants spend only one-third the time (98 minutes and 94 minutes respectively). On ‘food and meals management and preparation’ alone an average rural woman spends 207 minutes a day (rural man 97 minutes) and an average urban woman spends 199 minutes a day (urban man 88 minutes). So, cooking alone takes up more than three hours a day in an average Indian woman’s life.
Feminist economists have been highlighting the burden of unpaid work on women and the implications this has for their ability to participate in paid employment.
While the literature emerging from the Global North has mainly focused on unpaid care work (child care, elderly care and so on), feminists from developing countries have been emphasising on the need to expand the idea of unpaid work in the context of low- and middle-income countries to many other forms of work not only including unpaid domestic and household work as described above, but also a whole host of unpaid economic activities that women are involved in.
For instance, 37.5% of all women who are identified as being part of the labour force in the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), are in the ‘unpaid helpers in family enterprises’ category. This would include women involved in cultivation, animal husbandry, small family businesses and so on.
As a response to this high burden of unpaid work, the strategy of 5R Framework for Decent Care Work has been recommended by international organisations – it includes the call to Recognise, Redistribute and Reduce unpaid care work, and Reward and Represent paid care work. In the context of domestic services, including cooking, the first three are very important. Recognising that the time women spend on these activities as ‘work’ is the first step towards addressing the other aspects. While redistributing the burden of this work by greater sharing amongst household members is a desirable goal, along with it, it is also important that the time spent on such work is reduced.
Also read: Inside the Recent Rise in Female Workforce Participation Rate in Rural India
The time spent on cooking, for instance can be reduced by better access to facilities such as LPG cylinders or piped gas, availability of pressure cookers, a refrigerator and so on. Similarly better school meal and child care programmes, where hot and freshly cooked meals using local produce are distributed, can also contribute to reducing the burden of cooking at home.
These interventions also have multiple other benefits. In the absence of these, women face the triple burdens of house work, care work and employment/’productive’ work and end up being victims of time poverty. At an individual level they resort to processed and packaged foods which are easily available but have serious ramifications for health and nutrition.
The only other respite, for those who can afford it, is to hire domestic workers who can help with the household work. In such cases, the conditions of work and triple burden of the domestic workers is an issue and it only exposes of the intersectionalities and hierarchies among women. Women at the lower end of the economic and social order face even more extreme forms of time poverty.
Most discussions on women’s employment are focused on skill development and access to credit for entrepreneurship. There is now some acknowledgement of child care responsibilities on women, and therefore the need for maternity entitlements and creches. While there is still much to be achieved on these critical fronts, the burden of unpaid household work on women also needs to be brought into the picture. With cash transfers for women becoming common in a number of states and also being included as a proposal in the Congress manifesto for the recent general elections, we also saw male politicians talk about recognising women’s work at home.
The merits of ‘wages for housework’ has been an old debate among feminists. While on the one hand it might result in the recognition of women’s work along with some remuneration, some argue that it also reinforces gender stereotypes of domestic work being in the women’s domain. What needs to be brought in also is the need for all policies to be engendered including in this instance access to cooking gas, appliances, and cooked meals through welfare schemes.
Dipa Sinha is a development economist.
