Work and Home Divided Among Gender Lines in India

While women in India are integrated in many aspects of society, may they be community or cultural activities, religious practice, volunteering or sport, the spheres of housework and paid work remain squarely divided between the sexes.

In a pre-pandemic diary survey – the first of its kind in the country – almost 140,000 urban and rural households in India recorded the activities they were doing in a 24-hour period. The results show that only 18.4 percent of Indian women engage in paid work in a single day, while 81.2 percent of them carry out domestic work. For men, 57.3 percent had employment or related activities scheduled, while only around a quarter did work around the house. Another 20 percent of women and 14.3 percent of men engaged in the production of goods for their own final use, for example in subsistence farming.

According to the survey, rural women in India are actually slightly more likely to be employed, with 19.2 percent working on survey day compared to 16.7 percent of their urban counterparts. Rural men were also more likely to carry out housework and caregiving – at 27.7 percent and 14.4 percent doing so as part of the survey as opposed to 22.6 percent/13.2 percent of urban males. While smaller parts of the population engaged in learning on the day of the survey, women had almost caught up to men in that regard.