Put your money where your mouth is

"Me? Oh, I don’t do anything. I stay at home. I’m a housewife.” I hear this response all the time.

When I meet a couple, the husband usually steps forward to introduce himself, while the wife stands back and says a quiet ‘namaste’ with folded hands. Just as I ask the man what he does, I ask the woman — “What about you?” It’s about acknowledging her presence and bringing her into the conversation, not to enquire whether or how she earns. But if she is a homemaker, she often hesitates — especially if she is educated and modern.

A touch embarrassed, she might shyly say: “I don’t do anything.” This answer troubles me. Running a household is not ‘nothing’. I tell them my own story. I once had to take care of my two young kids alone for three weeks. I was abroad, with no family support. Domestic labour was so expensive there that hiring help was out of reach. So, I had to do everything — get the kids ready, drop them to school, sweep, mop, cook, do the dishes… Three weeks of doing ‘nothing’ broke my back! Whenever I hear a homemaker say she ‘does nothing’, I remember that exhaustion.

This little anecdote usually brings a smile to the woman’s face. But can a single story erase a deeply ingrained mindset? How do we get society to recognise the reality of this ‘nothing’ the woman does?

You’d think something so obvious doesn’t need proof. But a recent government report confirmed my belief that the average woman works more than the average man. This isn’t a casual study — it’s backed by hard numbers. Over the past five years, the Indian government has been conducting a ‘Time Use Survey’ at the national level.

Every five years, the National Sample Survey (NSS) collects data from about 1.5 lakh households, tracking how individuals aged six and above spend their time. They visit homes and ask, “What did you do from 4 a.m. yesterday to 4 a.m. today?”

Every task, recorded in half-hour slots, is analysed in the final report. The first such report came out in 2019; the latest, based on 2024 data, has just been released. The findings? On average, women work one hour more per day than men. A man works 307 minutes a day (or 5 hours and 7 minutes), while a woman works 367 minutes (or 6 hours and 7 minutes).

The real difference? Men get paid for most of their work; women don’t. Of the 307 minutes a man works, 251 minutes are paid work, and only 56 minutes are unpaid. For women, it’s the opposite. Out of their 367 minutes, only 62 minutes earn them money, while 305 minutes of work count as ‘nothing’. To simply infer that ‘men work outside, while women work at home’ is worse than careless; add up both paid and unpaid labour and you’ll find that women carry the heavier load.

Not all 2024 data is out yet, but the 2019 figures are revealing. This ‘nothing’ work falls into two broad categories — household tasks like cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, fetching water and care work like looking after children and the elderly. These burdens fall on women across all social classes. There’s a common misconception that if a woman starts earning, her domestic workload decreases. The reality? It gets worse. The survey reveals that ‘working’ (earning) women suffer a double burden.

Even after a workday outside, they still do a disproportionate share of the aforementioned housework — 348 minutes a day in rural areas, 316 minutes in urban areas. What if the man is unemployed? Surely, he helps around the house? The survey debunks this myth — unemployed men still do little to no housework.

Another stereotype: women ‘waste time’ on personal grooming. Data shows otherwise: where men spend 74 minutes a day bathing, dressing and grooming, women spend 68 minutes, on average. On eating and drinking too, men take 10 minutes longer than women.

What about leisure? A homemaker gets 113 minutes a day for rest, entertainment and casual conversation whereas the average man gets 127 minutes.

Who draws the line between paid and unpaid work? It’s clearly not about the importance of that work in our lives — we might get by without offices but without home kitchens and childcare…? The truth is that a male-dominated society has designed this imbalance to suit itself. How do we rectify this?

In recent years, we have witnessed a trend of some regular payouts for women under various schemes. Critics dismiss this as dangerous populism, but if this country runs on women’s unpaid labour more than men’s paid work, why shouldn’t their contribution be acknowledged? Instead of handing out cash doles in the form of pre-election bribes or charity, why not create something akin to a National Gratitude Fund for women — a structured, nationwide initiative to compensate their labour?

A fitting way to celebrate International Women’s Day, which falls on 8 March, might have been to start that conversation.