A typical Bangladeshi housewife has no set schedule, never gets a day off, rarely gets paid, and has no retirement benefits. Women, in the eyes of society, typically oversee household finances, care for children and the elderly, educate youngsters, shop for and prepare food, clean the house, and transport water and fuel.
The contribution of women in agriculture is more than that of men, according to the “Labour Survey 2022”. Women not only go to work in the fields, but also keep poultry, cows and goats at home, and produce various types of vegetables. For example, 17 out of 23 types of work in agriculture are done by women. Outsourcing those jobs would have cost money.
This amount will be added to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as per the new plan.
Currently, the contribution of women in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is 20%. However, if this domestic work of women is added to the System of National Income (SNA), the contribution of women to GDP will be 48 percent.
Economists have shown that more than 43% of women in Bangladesh are fully engaged in household work whereas men make up less than 1%.
Evaluating household work
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has directed the authorities concerned to include the undervalued and unrecognized domestic work of women in the national GDP from the 2024-25 fiscal year. She said: “From morning till night, women do all the housework, but that work does not come to anyone's attention. There is no recognition of that work.”
One of the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations is to eliminate the gender gap in unpaid work.
According to a 2019 report by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), women do unpaid work 3.5 times more than men. A woman spends an average of 24 hours a week, or about 3.5 hours a day, on unpaid household work.
Around the world, women do 4.4 hours of unpaid work on average and men only 1.7 hours. There are large differences across countries, according to a research by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In Norway, the gap is small, with women doing 3.7 hours of unpaid work, while men contribute 3. On the other extreme, in Egypt, women do 5.4 hours per day of unpaid work and men only 35 minutes. In the US, women do 3.8 hours of unpaid work and men do 2.4 hours.
After the government's announcement in this regard in April, rights activists are asking as to how the value of the household chores be determined. They ask whether women will be paid for housework from now on.
“Since no work is included in a market economy without monetary value, economists in many countries around the world generally rely on the satellite account system and do the hard work of the System of National Accounts (SNA),” rights activist and columnist Shahana Huda points out.
The satellite account system is a procedure that allows the economic evaluation of household work or service work to be measured. Issues such as gender equality, household income-expenditure, overall accountability are given greater importance in government policy and decision-making through this satellite account.
These tasks are performed by housewives without any economic transaction, or expectation of compensation. Although productive, women's work is not valued monetarily. Because their work is not exchanged in the market. If there is no market exchange, the price connection cannot be calculated.
Asked about the common idea that women should be paid in exchange for housework, and the argument that it is not possible to determine the exchange value of mothers' work, economist Mostafizur Rahman said: “Among the jobs that women are doing, those are not service jobs. Those jobs are economic, but not in GDP. Those jobs need to be valued, and that's what is being thought of."
He said: "If it is possible to add women's contribution to the economy, the GDP will increase by 70-80%.”
On the question of how the work will be done, Mostafizur Rahman said: “The method has not been selected yet. But what the government wants to do is start it on a limited scale…to conduct a financial evaluation of the activities women are doing.”