• Unpaid labour does not only affect women, but it affects them the most. A large part of their work, from working for the household farm or business to domestic and caregiving work is delegitimised as women’s work and is not considered ‘real’ work. 
• The proportion of unpaid work per day is far higher for women than men globally, while in case of India on average 66 per cent of women’s work is unpaid according to the WEF.
• According to the Census in 2011, people engaged in household duties have been treated as non-workers, even when 159.9 million women stated that household work was their main occupation.
• 49 per cent of women in India don’t have their work accounted for in the annual GDP.
• The work done at home doesn’t necessarily generate products and services for the market, economists often ignore it in their calculations and the result is that a massive portion of the work done by women in India goes unrecognised as labour and is treated as a duty
• A UN report shows that over 51% of the work done by women is unpaid, and is not counted in the nation’s GDP and other statistics.

How  recognising unpaid labour benefits India :-

• The value of unpaid domestic and care work done by women is estimatedto be 13% of the global GDP. 
• In a report, the International Monetary Fund also suggested that if women’s participation in the economy was raised to that of men, then India could grow its GDP by 27 per cent.

How recognising unpaid labour empowers women :-

• Recognition is one of the most central processes in empowerment, and for more than 150 million women in the country, the recognition of their primary occupation as genuine work, that contributes not only to the family but to the welfare of the nation state as a whole, is such that it gives them a claim to equality within the patriarchal Indian household that only recognises the work done by men.
• It moves India towards a more holistic understanding of labour that isn’t purely tied to the exchange value of a service on the market, and recognises an extremely intimate form of labour that has proved essential to keeping the unit of the family intact and functional.
• Gender justice :-
  • Once recognised as work, this arena of unpaid domestic labour that is dominated almost entirely by women can become one where women can demand some degree of parity in terms of the time and energy expended on it.
• Women could do more paid work and get more education if men did more unpaid work, or if both did fewer

What needs to be done :-

• Redistributing more unpaid work to men can happen through policies, like paid family leave.
  • Women are more likely to return to workafter having a baby when they have paid leave, and men who take paternity leave spend more time on child care later.

Conclusion:-

• For real equality, unpaid domestic work needs to be legitimised and given due recognition. Only then can we expect equal participation in the workforce, and in the household.