Are women victims of time poverty?

Last year, the National Statistical Office (NSO) in New Delhi raised an important question in its Time Use Survey to understand how Indians, in both urban and rural areas, spend their time. The question was, “How do you spend your day?” The survey covered 454,192 individuals between January and December 2024, and the findings, released in February, reveal a striking reality— the extreme “time poverty” experienced by Indian women, especially in rural areas.

Time poverty refers to a situation in which an individual lacks adequate time to ensure their own well-being, whether due to paid or unpaid work. This may eventually lead to a loss of income. Viewed through a gender perspective, time poverty in India often manifests as women devoting disproportionate hours to unpaid household chores and caregiving, leaving them with little or no time for remunerative work or personal needs.

Time poverty and income poverty are interlinked. The former excludes Indian women from the formal economy and perpetuates gender inequality. In 2015, a global study estimated this exclusion represented a loss of $9 trillion to women in developing countries.

The pattern of time poverty

A day consists of 24 hours or 1,440 minutes. The NSO survey sheds light on how these minutes are distributed between men and women in India— a revealing lifetime analysis of a “gender-blind” society. Men spend nearly 61% of their day on “employment and related activities”, while women devote only 20.7%. This means that while men dedicate a majority of their time to paid work, women spend only one-fifth of their time on paid work; the rest is spent on doing unpaid domestic chores, classified as “domestic services for household members”.

Women allocate 34% of their time to unpaid caregiving services for household members—nearly double the 18% spent by men. When it comes to producing goods for their own final use, women spend 21% of their time compared to 13% for men. The NSO data points out that women continue to shoulder the bulk of unpaid household work and caregiving responsibilities.

These findings are similar to those of the 2019 NSO survey. Between 2019 and 2024, women’s time spent on paid work and other related activities increased by only 2%. However, their time on unpaid domestic services and caregiving has also risen in the said period. Notably, women spent 34% of their time on caregiving in 2024, up from 27.6% in 2019 — a sharp 23.2% increase. This, indeed, is deeply concerning.

In sociological terms, it suggests that despite India’s technological and economic advancement, women face greater pressure than before. Since no separate time-spend pattern has been computed between urban and rural India, on this count, one must be careful while drawing conclusions. However, the general trend indicates an increasing pressure on women’s time. In comparison to men, women appear to be the primary “victims of time poverty”. While this conclusion of the author is not explicitly stated in the NSO report, a closer look at the data makes it abundantly clear.

Time Use Surveys like the NSO’s are increasingly recognised as valuable tools — not only for understanding the productive deployment of a country’s workforce but also for gauging gender inequality. Over a century ago, the former Soviet Union took up the first systematic time-use survey for industrial workers in 76 families. Its main objective was to monitor time use in three categories: work, sleep and rest. Through the surveys and diary entries of each family, the government wanted to examine whether the citizens spent more time on housework, which is considered “archaic”, and wanted to redeploy that for “collective services”.

In 1995, the United Nations organised the milestone Fourth World Conference on Women, where countries adopted the “Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action”. One of its principal aims was to “collect gender- and age-disaggregated data on poverty and all economic activities and develop qualitative and quantitative statistical indicators to assess the economic performance from a gender perspective”. Following this, the time-use surveys from a gender perspective have picked up. The world met between March 10 and 21 this year in New York to
mark the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration, and the focus was primarily on women’s time poverty.

(The author was a professor at the Royal Society, Belgium)