Measuring Women’s Labour Force Participation – The Way Forward

Women face several barriers to participate in the economy that pertains to burden of unpaid care work and the resultant time poverty, lack of adequate skills and knowledge as well as lack of opportunities. Amidst these, the unpaid care work is an important component of economic activity, often the insidious factor that is mostly invisible, undervalued, and unaccounted; the majority of economic analyses and policy formulations do not acknowledge the existence of unpaid care work in the production of goods and services. These also emerge from the ways in which ‘work’ has been defined in the System of National Accounts (SNS), which emphasises on employment-centric definitions. The SNA puts unpaid labour in the category of ‘own account services’ and excludes it from the activities in the production account. The Indian official LFS exclude certain categories of the population from its definition of the labour force on the basis of the activities performed by them. The measurement of women’s employment routinely ignores measuring and capturing these activities. The panellists would be discussing these measurement issues and innovative mechanisms to build into the existing LFS to better capture women’s’ routine work.