Revaluation of ‘Work’ from a Gender Perspective

Work usually means gainful employment for pay or profit. This definition of work excludes subsistence production such as collection of basic necessities like water, firewood and fuel, domestic work and care of the family. This means that the so called ‘reproductive ’sector is left to the women where their activities go unrecognized. Efforts have been going on for acknowledging women's work to raise women to economic, social and political parity with men. Women themselves have come forward to fight for their rights through trade unions and through their own organization by pressing for a revaluation of their paid work and for valuation in cash for their unpaid work. No one can deny the importance of unpaid work-it lowers the cost of reproduction of the labour force. Of course there are difficulties in the statistical system of identifying, enumerating and quantifying the work performed by women. Many of the activities associated with household maintenance, provisioning and reproduction, are not subject to explicit market relations. There is always a tendency to ignore the actual productive contribution of these activities. Similarly, social norms, values and perceptions also operate to make most of women's work invisible. These invisibilities get directly transferred to data inadequacies, making officially generated data in most countries very rough and imprecise indicators of the actual productive contribution of women. We need to do away with all these difficulties and revaluate the concept of ‘Work’ to make women's work accountable.