“How do you spend your day?” This casual question, if answered for a country, can unveil a lot about our socio-economic status — particularly on gender gaps. India’s National Statistical Office (NSO) posed this question in its “Time Use Survey” to some 454,192 people from across the country during January-December 2024, residing in both rural and urban areas. The answers, released in February 2025, reiterate the reality of extreme “time poverty” gripping Indian women.
Clinically, time poverty means lack of time owing to heavy paid or unpaid work leaving little for one’s own well-being, which may lead to loss of income as well. Seen from a gender lens, time poverty is defined as women spending too much time on unpaid household work and providing care to family members, thus leaving no time for paid or remunerative works, like in non-farm activities. Time poverty and income poverty are intertwined. Time poverty excludes women from the formal economy and perpetuates gender inequality. In 2015, a study estimated that this meant a loss of $9 trillion for women and economies of developing countries.
The NSO survey on how men and women spend 1,440 minutes of a day is a life-time analysis of gender-blind India. On “employment and related activities”, men spend nearly 61 per cent of a day, while women just 20.7 per cent. So, women don’t spend one-fifth of their time doing paid work. On “unpaid domestic services for household members”, women spend 81.5 per cent of their time while men just 27 per cent. On “unpaid caregiving for household members”, women spend 34 per cent of time while men just around 18 per cent. On “production of goods for own final use”, women spend nearly 21 per cent of time in comparison to men’s 13 per cent.
Women, as the data points out, continue to spend more time on unpaid household work and caregiving. A similar survey in 2019 by NSO found similar trends. On employment and related activities, in comparison to 2019 levels, women spend around 2 per cent more time in 2024. On unpaid domestic services for household members, women spend a few more minutes in 2024 than in 2019. But on caregiving for household members, women spend much more time than in 2019: from 27.6 per cent to 34 per cent in 2024.
Time use surveys, like the above Indian one, are increasingly being taken up to understand not just the productive deployment of the workforce but also to sense gender inequality. A century ago, the erstwhile Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) 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 this, and using diary entries of each family, the government wanted to see whether people spent more time on housework which they considered “archaic” and wanted to re-deploy that for “collective services”.
In 1995, the world had the milestone Fourth World Conference on Women organised by the United Nations, and it adopted the “Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action”. One of its calls of action is: “Collect gender and age-disaggregated data on poverty and all aspects of economic activity and develop qualitative and quantitative statistical indicators to facilitate the assessment of economic performance from a gender perspective.” After this, time use surveys from a gender lens have picked up. As the world meets March 10-21 in New York to mark the 30th anniversary of the Beijing conference, one of its key agendas is to take stock of the women’s time poverty.