Mind The Gap: More than ‘just’ a housewife

“Running a household, taking care of children, supporting the family, and adjusting one’s life around the career and transfers of the earning spouse are all forms of work,” justice Sharma noted. “These tasks are unpaid and often unrecognized…yet they form the invisible framework that keeps many families going.”

Justice Sharma’s words would be sweet music to the ears of feminists who have for years insisted that the activities listed by the Delhi high court do, in fact, constitute ‘work’. Feminist economists point out that the business of unpaid care work—cooking, cleaning, caring for children, the elderly, the sick—disproportionately falls on women, whether they are employed or not.

We have the data that tells us just how much. In 2024, the government’s Time Use Survey found, women spent 289 minutes a day providing unpaid household services plus another 137 minutes a day on caregiving activities. For men it was 88 minutes for housework plus 75 minutes for caregiving.

It’s this massive time gap that explains the discrepancy in paid employment. Put simply, the more time a woman spends on unpaid work inside the house, the less time she has for paid work outside it.

Time use for 2024 shows that 75% of men aged between 15 and 59 were in paid employment whereas only 25% of women in the same age group participated in paid work.

Unpaid care work is not only seen as a woman’s responsibility, it is often glorified in the popular culture—“maa ke haath ka khana” (a meal cooked by a mother’s hand) and the like.

B remembers when her mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer. Right until her death, she personally cared for her even though the family could afford a nurse. But her husband didn’t want a stranger handling his mother. He wanted his wife to do that job.

S went on maternity leave after the birth of her first daughter. But when the time came to return to work, she wavered. Sure, her husband chipped in. And she had reliable help at home, but somehow she couldn’t just go back to the long hours in the office. She quit. Does she have regrets? Sometimes, she shrugs. But takes satisfaction in the fact that her daughter is doing well in her career.

The motherhood penalty comes at a cost. Globally, mothers of children below the age of five have at 47.6%, the lowest employment rate, compared with 87.9% for fathers and 54.4% for women with no children, found a 2018 study of 90 countries by the International Labour Organisation.

Does care work have an economic value? A 2024 report by Nikore Associates puts it at 15%-17% of India’s GDP. In 2015, the McKinsey Global Institute looked at a “full potential” scenario where the world’s GDP could increase by $28 trillion in a decade if women’s participation in the economy was equal to that of men.

The Covid pandemic with people working from home during lockdowns focused renewed and urgent attention on care work. For a brief while, noted economist Ashwini Deshpande, the men stepped up to help their wives. Then it was back to usual.

Beyond the number of hours spent on various activities, there is the question of placing a monetary value to the work of a homemaker. In 2001, the Supreme Court determined that the monthly monetary value of a housewife’s work should be ₹3,000, “taking into consideration the multifarious services rendered” (Lata Wadhwa v State of Bihar).

Also in 2001, a three-judge Supreme Court bench, hearing a case against an insurance company (Kirti & anr v Oriental Insurance Company) where both husband and wife were killed in a road accident leaving behind two daughters who were toddlers, clarified that a homemaker’s work had economic value to her family and also the nation and deserved just compensation.

From then to now, the courts have continued to look at assumptions on housework, increasing its value progressively. Significantly, recent court judgments are also notable for speaking in the language of dignity and rights rather than charity.

In January this year, the Punjab and Haryana high court doubled the compensation paid to a woman motor accident victim from ₹58.22 lakh to ₹1.18 crore. The original compensation was simply not enough, justice Sudeepti Sharma said since the “services of a homemaker, if procured in the open market, would command substantial remuneration, underscoring the integral role played by a homemaker in family stability.”

A wife who is not employed still has to manage the household while the husband has a steady and substantial income, justice Swaran Kanta Sharma noted in the maintenance matter she was hearing. The case had been filed by an estranged wife who was appealing against a lower court order that refused to grant her and the child maintenance on the grounds that she was able-bodied and well-educated but had chosen not to seek employment.

Ordering mediation for the couple, justice Sharma said: “The grant of maintenance is rooted in the principle of equity between the parties. Maintenance, in such cases, is meant to place both parties at reasonably comparable levels so that each is able to sustain a dignified life.”

Going places

With an impeccable CV as a senior advocate—Rhodes scholar, National Law School, Oxford University and Harvard Law alum, visiting faculty at Yale, New York University and the University of Toronto, B.R. Ambedkar research scholar and lecturer at Columbia Law—Menaka Guruswamy will soon be adding member of Parliament to her long list of achievements.

The 51-year-old has been nominated to the Rajya Sabha by Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, that would, when elected, make her the first openly gay MP in the House. One of the many lawyers who fought for marriage equality in the Supreme Court, Guruswamy had earlier represented petitioners in the landmark constitutional challenge that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 2018. Menaka will, hopefully, continue to battle for gender rights and equality, now as a legislator.