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Conceptual and theoretical norms are at the root of statistical biases leading to the underestimation of women's work in labour force and national accounting statistics. Initially viewed as a way of making women's work more visible, the effort to account for women's work has gradually evolved to include all unpaid work by whomever it is performed (men, women, children). The evolution of this effort illustrates how the questions raised by feminists have a relevance transcending feminism and challenging basic tenets in conventional economic thinking.
Ester Boserup, in her classic 1970 book, Woman's role in economic development, pointed out that "the subsistence activities usually omitted in the statistics of production and income are largely women's work" (Boserup, 1970, p. 163). She was a pioneer in emphasizing the time-consuming character of these activities which, in rural economies, include physically demanding tasks such as fetching wood and carrying water as well as food production and the "crude processing of basic foods".
Even earlier, Margaret Reid, in her 1934 book, Economics of household production, expressed concern about the exclusion of domestic production from national income accounts and designed a method to estimate the value of homebased work. Then, from the late 1960s, the international women's movement prepared the ground for a new look at the estimation of women's economic activities. The issue was then seen as symbolizing society's undervaluation of women and of their contribution to social well-being. The four world conferences on women held under the auspices of the United Nations since 1975 have been instrumental in getting the topic incorporated into the United Nations agendas and subsequent plans of action. At a different level, Marylin Waring's 1988 book, If women counted, contributed to making the issue better known to a large audience. Over the past 20 years, national governments and individual researchers and activist groups have contributed significantly to this effort.
An important body of mainstream literature has developed on time allocation data, including unpaid work. The first systematic collection of these data occurred in the USSR in 1924, the objective then being to collect information about specific topics such as leisure time and community-oriented work (Juster and Stafford, 1991). Since the 1960s, national and comparative studies of time use have been carried out for a variety...