Invisible work, visible value

Think of a household where the husband works a modest nine-to-five job while his wife stays at home. She cooks, cleans, cares for children and elders, manages the household, fixes small things, and keeps everything running. In the city they live in, a full-time cook earns between Tk 5,000 and Tk 10,000 a month; a domestic help for cleaning and laundry earns Tk 3,000 to Tk 5,000; private tutors for school-age children cost Tk 5,000 to Tk 15,000; an elderly caregiver earns Tk 12,000 to Tk 25,000; and a personal assistant would charge another Tk 7,000 to Tk 15,000. If all the work the woman does were priced at market rates, it would amount to roughly Tk 30,000 to Tk 70,000 a month -- more than what many salaried employees take home.

Yet what society sees is only the husband's nine-to-five pay check, not the wife's labour from dawn till midnight. If her work vanished for a single day, the household would collapse - yet in the eyes of the economy, nothing would have changed. Here comes the question of recognising household work or including it in the country's gross domestic product (GDP). You'll often see economists, NGOs, and columnists urging for including household work in GDP. But what does it mean?

RECOGNITION VERSUS INCLUSION: The first misconception that needs to be clear is that recognising the economic value of household work does not necessarily mean paying for that work. The purpose is measurement and recognition - to make the invisible visible in national accounts. So, practically, it does not generate any cash. The exercise is statistical, not fiscal.

Another key point is to separate two ideas: recognising household work and officially including it in GDP. Many countries recognise the economic value of household work. For instance, Australia has estimated unpaid household work since 1997 using Household Satellite Accounts. The latter, officially including it in GDP, is not practiced in any country.

WHAT GDP REALLY MEASURES: GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, was designed to measure the total market value of goods and services produced within a country. The key word is market. The global framework used for calculating GDP, known as the System of National Accounts (SNA), recognises only activities that involve monetary exchange. Anything that takes place inside the household without a price tag, no matter how essential, disappears from the nation's economic radar.

This is why unpaid domestic and care work, performed mostly by women, is systematically excluded from the official growth story. When we say women contribute about 20 per cent to Bangladesh's GDP, we refer only to their paid work - in factories, offices, farms, and markets. If the hours women spend cooking, cleaning, caring for children, or tending to the elderly were given economic value, that contribution would increase the GDP significantly.

For instance, in 2015, the Manusher Jonno Foundation (MJF) commissioned the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) to research women's economic contributions and found that the value of women's unpaid household work was equivalent to 76.8 per cent of GDP in fiscal 2013-14 if additional women were hired to replace them. The GDP in that year was US$ 172.9 billion. If that value were added, the GDP would have been about US$ 305.7 billion.

MEASURING THE INVISIBLE WORK: This brings us to a crucial question - what would it actually entail to include household work in GDP, rather than merely recognise it?

Including household work in GDP would mean more than simply acknowledging women's unpaid labour. It would require attaching a monetary value to those hours and treating them as part of the country's formal production. But how to measure the value? Economists generally use two main methods: (1) Replacement-cost method, which asks what it would cost if someone were hired to do the same tasks; and (2) Opportunity-cost method, which calculates what the worker could have earned if she had spent that time in paid employment instead. Either way, the result is an enormous sum that reflects real economic effort currently hidden from the data.

ACCOUNTING VERSUS INCLUSION: As mentioned earlier, accounting for household work and including it in GDP are not identical steps. Accounting means measuring and recognising the value of unpaid work; including means officially adding it to the national income.

By using time-use surveys, the amount of time men and women devote to both paid and unpaid work can be tracked. These surveys capture unpaid household and care work that regular employment surveys miss. Through this, statistical agencies record how men and women spend each hour of the day.

This data feed into household satellite accounts or supplementary estimates, which assign a hypothetical market value to unpaid domestic labour. The word satellite indicates that this account does not add to the main national income account but orbits beside it. Supplementary estimates are side calculations that show the economic value of things left out of GDP without officially adding them.

These tools help governments understand the size of the "invisible economy" and recognise household work, mostly done by women, as a significant component of national productivity.

THE DEEPER CHALLENGE OF INCLUSION: Including household work inside GDP itself would be a far more radical shift. To include household work means redefining what we consider production. It means treating the unpaid labour that reproduces and maintains the workforce as part of the same economic system that factories and offices belong to. It also means building an internationally accepted statistical method capable of assigning market value to non-market activities - a challenge that involves data collection, valuation techniques, and political consensus. In essence, it calls for expanding the very boundaries of the economy.

There's also an international dimension to this debate. If some countries added the value of household work to their GDP while others did not, it would create disparities in global comparisons, rankings, and the perceived size of economies. For instance, Bangladesh's GDP was lower than Pakistan's in 2013-2014. If Bangladesh included the value of unpaid household work while Pakistan did not, Bangladesh's economy would appear larger on paper, even though no additional market production occurred.

A PRACTICAL STEP FOR BANGLADESH: We can and should engage in this global debate. But for Bangladesh, developing satellite accounts for household work is a more practical and immediate step. Countries such as the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia already maintain these accounts regularly to estimate the economic value of unpaid household and care work alongside official GDP data.

Establishing such accounts would formally recognise and quantify women's unpaid contributions to the economy, thereby making their labour visible in national statistics. This recognition can generate evidence for gender-responsive policymaking, support future frameworks for social protection and compensation, and initiate a broader shift in how "work" is conceptually defined and socially valued.

Recognising household work may not put cash directly in women's hands, but it restores their rightful place in the story of national progress. In the long run, such recognition changes narratives, policies, and power relations, redefining how we value work, care, and contribution in society. By measuring household production systematically, Bangladesh can strengthen both the analytical foundation and the policy legitimacy for acknowledging women's role in sustaining the economy.

CONCLUSION: To measure is to value and to value is to empower. Recognizing women's unpaid work within national accounts does not simply adjust the numbers - it corrects an injustice. Such official recognition may not immediately raise the living standard of a household, but it will bring prestige and acknowledgment to women's contributions in a patriarchal society like Bangladesh. When the state values what has long been taken for granted, it elevates women's status not only in statistics but in social perception as well.

Each meal cooked, each child nurtured, each elder tended is a quiet act that keeps the economy running. The question is no longer whether this labour has some value, but whether society has the courage to acknowledge it.

Dewan Tahmid, M.A. in Economics and Postgraduate Diploma in Education, is a research and data analysis professional. Dtahmid71@gmail.com