This paper examines whether constitutional equality in India can be substantively realised while women continue to perform a disproportionate share of unpaid domestic and care work. It combines normative analysis with a critical review of India’s latest nationally representative time-use evidence. The central empirical source is the National Statistical Office’s Time Use Survey 2024: Fact Sheet (NSO, 2025), read alongside feminist-economic studies of unpaid work, capability theory, feminist legal theory, care ethics and social-reproduction theory. The 2024 survey shows that women aged six and above averaged 236 minutes per day in unpaid domestic services and 47 minutes in unpaid caregiving, compared with 24 and 13 minutes respectively for men. Under the survey’s broader classification of unpaid activities, women averaged 305 minutes per day, whereas men averaged 56 minutes. The paper argues that these inequalities are not merely differences in private preference. They distribute time, dependency, income, leisure and opportunities for public participation unequally. Formal equality before law therefore remains necessary but insufficient. The paper’s original contribution is a time-capability test of substantive equality, according to which an institution or policy should be evaluated by whether its temporal effects leave women and men with genuinely comparable capabilities to earn, learn, rest, participate politically and revise their life plans. On this account, constitutional equality requires recognition, reduction and redistribution of unpaid work, together with universal care infrastructure, gender-equitable leave, social protection and decent conditions for paid care workers.
Keywords: unpaid care work; substantive equality; time poverty; feminist economics; constitutional equality; capabilities; social reproduction; India; Time Use Survey.
Can constitutional equality be substantively realised in India while women continue to bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic and care labour?
The paper answers this question in the negative, subject to an important qualification. Constitutional rights remain indispensable, but they cannot by themselves secure equality if the social organisation of care deprives women of the time and resources required to exercise those rights. Unequal care burdens convert formally equal liberties into unequally usable freedoms.
Unpaid domestic and care work includes activities such as cooking, cleaning, household management, childcare and care for older, sick or disabled household members when performed without monetary compensation. Although these activities sustain households, workers and the wider economy, they are frequently treated as natural expressions of femininity rather than socially necessary labour. Indira Hirway’s Unpaid Work and the Economy: Linkages and Their Implications (Hirway, 2015) argues that unpaid work has multiple linkages with the conventional economy and that macroeconomic analysis remains partial when it excludes this work. Nancy Fraser’s Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism (Fraser, 2016) similarly conceptualises caregiving and household maintenance as social reproduction: indispensable activity on which production and political life depend, even though it is systematically devalued.[1][2]
The philosophical problem is not that care lacks moral value. Human beings are interdependent, and every society must organise care for children, older persons, persons with disabilities and others experiencing dependency. Feminist ethics emphasises precisely this universality of vulnerability and interdependence (Feminist Ethics, Norlock, 2019). The injustice arises when socially indispensable care is naturalised as women’s responsibility and the resulting costs—in time, income, health, leisure and public participation—are privately absorbed by women.[^3]
Indian constitutionalism prohibits sex discrimination and promises equality before law. Yet a substantive conception of equality asks not only whether women and men possess the same rights in legal form, but whether social arrangements enable them to exercise those rights under comparable conditions. The Supreme Court of India has expressly distinguished equality “in law” from equality “in fact” and described substantive equality as imposing positive obligations to remedy disadvantage (Supreme Court of India, 2025 INSC 1248, 2025). A later judgment explains that where persons occupy unequal social, economic or cultural positions, identical treatment may be inadequate; substantive equality concerns the meaningful exercise of choice, not merely possession of formal rights (Supreme Court of India, 2026 INSC 97, 2026).[4][5]
This paper places unpaid care work within that constitutional and philosophical framework. Its thesis is that the unequal distribution of time constitutes a structural form of disadvantage. Women may formally enjoy equal access to education, employment and politics, but a daily care burden several times greater than men’s diminishes their effective capacity to make use of those opportunities. Substantive equality consequently requires institutional reorganisation of care, not simply nondiscrimination within institutions designed around a worker presumed to be free from caregiving obligations.
Feminist economics and invisibility
Feminist economists have long challenged the identification of economically productive activity with market exchange. In Unpaid Work and the Economy: Linkages and Their Implications (Hirway, 2015), Hirway argues that unpaid work sustains and subsidises the conventional economy even when national accounting systems place much of it outside measured production. She proposes valuation through satellite accounts and the recognition, reduction and reorganisation of unpaid work. Her edited volume Mainstreaming Unpaid Work: Time-use Data in Developing Policies (Hirway, 2017) develops the methodological and policy case for incorporating time-use evidence into analyses of poverty, employment, human development and gender justice.[6][2]
Time-use surveys are particularly important because conventional labour surveys may fail to capture informal, subsistence and simultaneous activities in which women are heavily represented. In Understanding Women’s Work Using Time-Use Statistics (Hirway, 2011), Hirway demonstrates that time-use methods can improve estimates and understanding of women’s work in developing economies, especially informal employment and subsistence production. The conceptual implication is significant: statistical invisibility is not a neutral technical defect. When policy recognises only monetised work, it defines the male-coded market worker as economically active while treating much of women’s contribution as inactivity.[^7]
Pushpendra Singh and Falguni Pattanaik’s Unfolding Unpaid Domestic Work in India: Women’s Constraints, Choices, and Career (Singh and Pattanaik, 2020) examines women’s unpaid domestic work through three interacting explanations: social and religious constraints, failures of markets and the state to provide essential services, and women’s comparatively low opportunity costs in labour markets. This approach is useful because it resists describing women’s unpaid work as either wholly coerced or simply chosen. Preferences are exercised within unequal institutions, limited public provisioning and gendered labour-market opportunities.[8][9]
Labour-market and well-being effects
The international evidence consistently links unequal unpaid care work to unequal labour-market access. Jacques Charmes’s ILO study The Unpaid Care Work and the Labour Market (Charmes, 2019) reports that women globally perform more than three-quarters of unpaid care work and spend, on average, 3.2 times as much time on it as men. The study argues that this imbalance produces time poverty and constrains labour-market participation.[^10]
India-specific causal evidence strengthens this association. In Well-being Costs of Unpaid Care: Gendered Evidence from a Contextualized Time-Use Survey in India (Sinha et al., 2024), the authors use instrumental-variable estimation to examine the effects of caregiving on labour supply, time allocation and subjective well-being. They report larger adverse effects for women: an additional hour of caregiving reduced women’s probability of labour-market participation by 20 percentage points in the study sample, reduced employment hours by more than an hour per day, and diminished time for self-care and socialising as well as reported life satisfaction and happiness. Because this result comes from a contextualised primary survey rather than the national TUS, it should not be mechanically generalised to every Indian woman. Nevertheless, it supports the mechanism by which care obligations translate into unequal capabilities.[11][12]
An analysis of the 2019 national survey, Building India’s Economy on the Backs of Women’s Unpaid Work (Chakraborty, 2023), finds that women’s disproportionate unpaid-work burden persisted across education, employment and marital status. It also reports a substantial “double burden” among employed women and argues for public investment in care infrastructure, gender-equitable leave and flexible working arrangements. This literature establishes that paid employment does not necessarily replace women’s unpaid responsibilities; women may instead combine both.[^13]
Capabilities and substantive equality
Capability theory supplies a normative bridge between time-use evidence and equality. Martha Nussbaum’s Women and Equality: The Capabilities Approach (Nussbaum, 1999) evaluates justice in terms of what persons are actually able to do and be rather than formal entitlement alone. In Poverty and Human Functioning: Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements (Nussbaum, 2003), she explicitly identifies unpaid caregiving as a gender-justice issue because it can disable women from pursuing other human functions even where those functions are formally open to them.[14][15]
Feminist legal theory reaches a related conclusion. Feminist Philosophy of Law (Scales, 2009) observes that caregiving can place caregivers in relations of economic dependence and argues that law and policy must address this dependent status while supporting the socially valuable work of care. Equality should therefore not require women to approximate an unencumbered male worker while leaving the organisation of care unchanged. It should transform institutions so that dependency and caregiving do not predict economic subordination.[^16]
Care ethics and social reproduction
Care ethics corrects theories of justice that imagine persons as permanently independent. Feminist Ethics (Norlock, 2019) presents care theory as grounded in human interdependence, vulnerability and relational responsibility. Its strength is to insist that care cannot be treated as a regrettable interruption of “real” economic or political life. Its risk, if misapplied, is romanticising care in ways that reproduce the expectation that women should provide it selflessly.[^3]
Social-reproduction theory places care within economic structure. Fraser’s Crisis of Care? (Fraser, 2016) argues that capitalist economies depend on activities that maintain households, communities and labour power while according them little or no monetary value. The resulting care crisis is structural rather than accidental. This perspective shifts the question from whether individual men should “help” women to how states, markets, communities and households distribute the resources and responsibilities of sustaining life.[^1]
The existing literature establishes four propositions: unpaid work is economically indispensable but statistically and institutionally undervalued; women perform a disproportionate share; unequal care constrains labour-market participation and well-being; and just policy must recognise, reduce and redistribute care. What remains comparatively underdeveloped is an explicit normative test connecting time inequality to Indian constitutional equality.
This paper fills that gap by proposing a time-capability test. The test asks whether the temporal organisation of an institution leaves differently situated persons with genuinely comparable capabilities to exercise constitutional freedoms. It does not assume that equal outcomes require identical schedules, nor does it treat care as intrinsically oppressive. It asks whether care is allocated under conditions of reciprocity, support and revisability, or whether gender determines who must sacrifice other central capabilities.
This is a normative research paper supported by secondary quantitative analysis. It does not claim to conduct a new household survey or establish causal effects from national time-use data. The empirical analysis uses descriptive statistics from the National Statistical Office’s Time Use Survey 2024: Fact Sheet (NSO, 2025), the second all-India time-use survey.[17][18]
The 2024 TUS employed a stratified two-stage sampling design. It surveyed 139,487 households—83,247 rural and 56,240 urban—and collected information from 454,192 persons aged six and above. Respondents reported activities performed during a 24-hour reference period, from 4:00 a.m. on the day preceding interview to 4:00 a.m. on the interview day, in 30-minute time slots. Up to three activities lasting at least ten minutes could be recorded within a slot, and activities were coded using the International Classification of Activities for Time-Use Statistics 2016 (NSO, Time Use Survey 2024: Fact Sheet, 2025).[^19]
Three measures must be distinguished. Participation rate is the percentage performing an activity during the reference day. Average time per participant counts only those who performed the activity. Average time per person averages across the entire relevant population, including non-participants. The per-person measure is especially useful for evaluating the social distribution of time, while the per-participant measure shows task intensity among those performing it (NSO, Time Use Survey 2024: Fact Sheet, 2025).[^19]
The survey records persons aged six and above, so its headline figures should not be treated as measurements only of working-age adults. A single 24-hour recall can also be affected by day-to-day variation, recall and classification choices. Moreover, descriptive sex differences do not by themselves prove that unpaid work causes every observed difference in employment or well-being. These limitations require cautious interpretation.
The 2024 TUS records a sharp reversal between paid employment and unpaid household work. Among persons aged six and above, 60.8% of men participated in employment-related activities during the reference day, compared with 20.7% of women. Conversely, 81.5% of women performed unpaid domestic services, compared with 27.1% of men. For unpaid caregiving, participation was 34.0% among women and 17.9% among men (NSO, Time Use Survey 2024: Fact Sheet, 2025).[^19]
| Activity, age 6+ | Men | Women | Female–male difference |
| Employment-related participation | 60.8% | 20.7% | −40.1 percentage points |
| Unpaid domestic-services participation | 27.1% | 81.5% | +54.4 percentage points |
| Unpaid caregiving participation | 17.9% | 34.0% | +16.1 percentage points |
Source: NSO, Time Use Survey 2024: Fact Sheet (2025).[18][19]
The participation gap matters philosophically because it indicates a gendered assignment of responsibility, not merely different amounts of time among otherwise similar participants. More than four-fifths of women performed domestic services on the reference day, compared with slightly more than one-quarter of men. Care is therefore organised as an ordinary obligation for women but a minority activity for men.
Among those who performed unpaid domestic services, women spent 289 minutes per day and men 88 minutes—a difference of 201 minutes. Female caregiving participants spent 137 minutes, compared with 75 minutes among male participants. Women participants therefore faced both a higher probability of doing unpaid household work and greater intensity once they did it (NSO, Time Use Survey 2024: Fact Sheet, 2025).[^19]
| Activity, participants only | Men | Women | Female–male difference |
| Unpaid domestic services | 88 min/day | 289 min/day | +201 min/day |
| Unpaid caregiving | 75 min/day | 137 min/day | +62 min/day |
| Employment-related activity | 473 min/day | 341 min/day | −132 min/day |
Source: NSO, Time Use Survey 2024: Fact Sheet (2025).[^19]
These figures should not be added to estimate total time for a “typical participant,” because the participant populations differ by activity and some activities may overlap within time slots. Their proper use is comparative: women who performed domestic and caregiving activities devoted substantially more time to them than men who performed the same categories.
Population-wide time allocation
The per-person measure gives the clearest picture of aggregate gendered time allocation. Women averaged 236 minutes per day in unpaid domestic services and 47 minutes in unpaid caregiving, totalling 283 minutes. Men averaged 24 and 13 minutes respectively, totalling 37 minutes. Women thus devoted approximately 7.6 times as much population-wide time to these two categories as men. Meanwhile, men averaged 287 minutes in employment-related activity compared with 71 minutes for women (NSO, Time Use Survey 2024: Fact Sheet, 2025).[^19]
| Activity, all persons age 6+ | Men | Women | Female-to-male ratio |
| Unpaid domestic services | 24 min/day | 236 min/day | 9.8× |
| Unpaid caregiving | 13 min/day | 47 min/day | 3.6× |
| Domestic services plus caregiving | 37 min/day | 283 min/day | 7.6× |
| Employment-related activity | 287 min/day | 71 min/day | 0.25× |
Source: NSO, Time Use Survey 2024: Fact Sheet (2025). Ratios calculated from published minutes.[^19]
Under the survey’s broader classification, which includes production of goods for own consumption and other unpaid activities as well as domestic and caregiving services, women averaged 305 minutes of unpaid activity per day and men 56 minutes. Women devoted 62 minutes to paid activities and men 251 minutes. These broader figures differ from the ICATUS employment and domestic-care categories because the classifications are not identical (NSO, Time Use Survey 2024: Fact Sheet, 2025).[^19]
The comparison with 2019 reveals persistence rather than redistribution. Women’s participation in the broad unpaid-activity category was 84.0% in 2019 and 83.9% in 2024; men’s participation rose modestly from 43.9% to 45.8%. Women’s average unpaid-activity time remained 305 minutes per person per day in both years, while men’s fell from 67 to 56 minutes (NSO, Time Use Survey 2024: Fact Sheet, 2025).[^19]
At the same time, women’s participation in broad paid activities increased from 17.1% to 20.6%, and their average paid-activity time across all women rose from 56 to 62 minutes. These developments indicate a limited expansion of women’s paid activity without a corresponding reduction in their average unpaid-work time. The pattern is consistent with the “double burden” identified in Building India’s Economy on the Backs of Women’s Unpaid Work (Chakraborty, 2023), though the national aggregates alone cannot show how the paid and unpaid burdens combine within particular individuals.[^13]
Why formal equality is insufficient
Formal equality requires that similarly situated persons receive equal legal treatment. It can prohibit explicit exclusion from education, employment or public office. But it does not necessarily correct background conditions that make the same legal opportunity far more costly for one group to use. The 2024 TUS shows that women and men do not approach public opportunities with equivalent discretionary time.
A right to employment has limited substantive value if one group must first perform nearly five hours of domestic and caregiving work per day on a population-wide basis. A right to political participation is weakened if meetings, campaigning and deliberation compete with non-negotiable household responsibilities. A right to education is similarly constrained where girls’ and women’s time is treated as a household resource available for care. The unequal distribution of unpaid work therefore affects not only economic equality but citizenship itself.
The Supreme Court’s formulation in 2026 INSC 97 (Supreme Court of India, 2026)—that substantive equality concerns whether individuals can meaningfully exercise choices—provides the relevant constitutional principle. Equal rights without comparable temporal capability risk becoming what may be called paper equality: formally universal but unequally usable.[^4]
Time as a distributive resource
Political philosophy commonly analyses distributions of income, resources, opportunities and capabilities. Time must be included among these goods because every right requires time for its exercise. Unlike income, time cannot be saved indefinitely, borrowed without limit or transferred straightforwardly between persons. A daily hour consumed by unavoidable domestic labour is an hour unavailable for paid work, education, rest or political action.
Time inequality is not reducible to working fewer market hours. Some care activities possess intrinsic relational value and may be willingly chosen. The injustice lies in a patterned distribution in which gender predicts who is expected to provide care, who absorbs the opportunity cost and who retains greater freedom from routine household necessity. Feminist care ethics requires valuing care; substantive equality requires preventing that valuation from becoming a moral alibi for women’s exploitation.
Choice and adaptive preference
It would be analytically careless to infer that every woman performing domestic work is directly coerced. Singh and Pattanaik’s Unfolding Unpaid Domestic Work in India (2020) offers a more adequate model in which constraint, institutional failure and labour-market opportunity interact with choice. A woman may value caring for family members while also lacking affordable childcare, safe employment, transport or bargaining power within the household.[^8]
Capability theory explains why stated preference cannot be the sole test of justice. People form aspirations under social conditions; persistent inequality may be accepted because alternatives are inaccessible, punished or difficult to imagine. The relevant question is therefore not simply “Did she choose to care?” but “Could she refuse, renegotiate or share the responsibility without suffering unacceptable economic or social costs?” A genuinely autonomous caring choice requires feasible alternatives.
Gender averages conceal differences among women. Affluent households may reduce some women’s unpaid burden by purchasing domestic and care services, but this often transfers care to lower-paid women whose work may be insecure and socially devalued. Fraser’s social-reproduction analysis warns that marketising care does not automatically produce equality; it can create a stratified system in which privileged women gain labour-market access through the underpaid labour of less privileged women.[^20]
Caste, class, migration, age, disability, household composition and location therefore mediate care burdens and access to relief. A substantively equal care policy cannot be limited to professional women in formal employment. It must include informal workers, unpaid carers outside the labour force, paid domestic workers and rural households facing infrastructure deficits. The distributive question is not only whether men perform more care, but whether the costs of care are shifted downward along existing social hierarchies.
This paper proposes a time-capability test of substantive equality. The test evaluates a law, policy, workplace or household institution through four questions:
- Temporal distribution: Does the institution allocate necessary unpaid work in a way that predictably imposes substantially greater time costs on women or another disadvantaged group?
- Capability effect: Does that allocation diminish effective opportunities for paid work, education, rest, health, political participation, association or life planning?
- Revisability: Can caregivers refuse, renegotiate, share or exit the caring arrangement without severe economic, social or physical penalties?
- Public responsibility: Has the state taken reasonable steps to reduce avoidable labour and socialise necessary care through services, infrastructure, income support and gender-equitable leave?
This test adds to existing literature in three respects. First, it connects time-use statistics directly to constitutional evaluation. Second, it avoids treating the monetary valuation of unpaid work as the complete solution; even well-valued work may remain unequally imposed and capability-restricting. Third, it treats care recipients’ interests and caregivers’ autonomy as mutually relevant. The goal is not to minimise care regardless of quality, but to organise good care without gendered subordination.
The time-capability test does not require every household to divide every task into mathematically identical shares. Substantive equality permits diverse arrangements where they are genuinely chosen, supported and revisable. It does, however, reject a social pattern in which women’s disproportionate sacrifice is presumed normal and policy is designed around that presumption.
The normative threshold is reached when gendered time burdens systematically impair central capabilities. The 2024 national figures provide strong evidence that India is beyond that threshold: the gap is large, national and persistent across two survey rounds. This does not establish that every household is unjust, but it identifies a structural inequality requiring public remedy.
Regular national time-use surveys should be institutionalised and integrated with labour, health and household-economic data. Hirway’s Mainstreaming Unpaid Work (2017) demonstrates why such measurement is necessary for policy analysis, while the 2019 and 2024 surveys show the value of repeat observations. Data should be routinely disaggregated by sex, age, caste, class, disability, rural–urban location, household structure and employment status, subject to privacy and statistical reliability.[^6]
Recognition should include satellite accounts and public reporting, but monetary valuation must not imply that all care should be commodified. The purpose of measurement is to make social dependence visible, improve policy and identify inequality—not to reduce affection and responsibility to market prices.
Public infrastructure can reduce the time required for necessary household provisioning. Reliable water, sanitation, clean energy, transport, school meals, healthcare and assistive services diminish labour that households otherwise supply privately. The ILO’s Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work (ILO, 2018) explicitly includes care-relevant infrastructure alongside care services and social protection.[^21]
Reduction must not mean poorer care. It means removing drudgery, duplication and service gaps so that caregivers can provide relational care without also compensating for absent infrastructure.
Redistribution has three dimensions: between women and men, between households and the state, and between unpaid and properly paid provision. Gender-neutral, adequately paid and non-transferable parental leave can strengthen men’s caregiving responsibility more effectively than maternity-only policies. Workplace flexibility should benefit all carers and must not become a track that confines women to insecure or stagnant employment.
The ILO’s 5R framework—recognise, reduce and redistribute unpaid care, and reward and represent paid care workers—offers a coherent policy architecture (Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work, ILO, 2018). UN Women’s A Toolkit on Paid and Unpaid Care Work (UN Women, 2022) similarly calls for universal care systems, quality services, infrastructure, equitable leave and improved care statistics.[22][23][^24]
Build universal care infrastructure
Affordable, accessible and high-quality childcare, eldercare, disability support and community health services should be treated as social infrastructure rather than discretionary welfare. India’s official policy brief India’s Care Economy (Confederation of Indian Industry for the Ministry of Women and Child Development, 2024) recommends leave policies, care-service subsidies, investment in infrastructure, skills for care workers and institutional quality assurance.[^25]
Universalism matters because employer-provided care alone excludes many informal, self-employed, casual and unpaid workers. Public provisioning should therefore establish a floor of access, with attention to rural and underserved areas.
Reward and represent paid carers
Shifting work from unpaid households into the market is not emancipatory if paid care remains low-wage, insecure and feminised. Care workers require fair remuneration, occupational standards, social protection and collective voice. The ILO’s 5R framework correctly links the redistribution of unpaid care with the rewarding and representation of paid care workers (Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work, ILO, 2018).[^24]
Limitations and Research Agenda
The paper’s principal limitation is that it draws normative conclusions from descriptive national data. The TUS establishes the magnitude and persistence of gendered time allocation but does not alone identify all causal pathways. Future work should link repeated time-use diaries with longitudinal data on income, employment transitions, health, education and political participation.
Second, the age-six-plus headline measure is valuable for national accounting but insufficient for some labour-market questions. Further analysis should focus on working-age groups while retaining separate attention to children and adolescents, since early gendered divisions of household labour can shape later capabilities.
Third, population averages obscure simultaneous activities and variation in intensity. Thirty minutes of passive supervision is not equivalent to thirty minutes of physically or emotionally demanding care. Qualitative interviews and care-recipient data are needed to understand control, responsibility, emotional labour and quality of care.
Finally, intersectional analysis remains essential. Future research should examine whether caste, class, religion, disability, migration and household form change both the quantity of care and the bargaining conditions under which it is performed. Such work would refine the time-capability test by identifying when apparently similar time burdens produce different degrees of constraint.
Constitutional equality cannot be fully realised while unpaid domestic and care labour remains so sharply gendered. The Time Use Survey 2024: Fact Sheet (NSO, 2025) shows that women aged six and above averaged 283 minutes per day in unpaid domestic and caregiving services, compared with 37 minutes for men. Under the survey’s broader unpaid-activity classification, women averaged 305 minutes and men 56 minutes. These are not marginal differences in lifestyle. They structure access to income, education, rest, health, association and political life.[^19]
The normative implication is not that care should be devalued or that every difference in household practice is unconstitutional. It is that equal citizenship requires the conditions under which rights can be meaningfully exercised. Where one gender bears a systematically greater temporal cost for sustaining households and society, formally identical rights operate on unequal terrain.
The time-capability test proposed here makes that inequality visible. It asks whether institutions distribute time fairly, preserve central capabilities, permit caring arrangements to be revised and discharge public responsibility for care. On this standard, substantive equality requires more than admitting women into existing markets and institutions. It requires redesigning those institutions around the fact that all persons give and receive care—and ensuring that the work of sustaining life no longer produces gendered subordination.
Chakraborty, S. (2023). “Building India’s Economy on the Backs of Women’s Unpaid Work: A Gendered Analysis of Time-Use Data.” ORF Occasional Paper. Available online.
Charmes, J. (2019). The Unpaid Care Work and the Labour Market: An Analysis of Time Use Data Based on the Latest World Compilation of Time-use Surveys. Geneva: International Labour Organization. Full text.
Confederation of Indian Industry and Ministry of Women and Child Development. (2024). India’s Care Economy: Embracing a Growth Model That Invests in Care. Government of India. Full text.
Fraser, N. (2016). “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism.” New Left Review, 100, 99–117. Full text.
Hirway, I. (2011). “Understanding Women’s Work Using Time-Use Statistics: The Case of India.” Feminist Economics, 16(3), 67–92. Publisher page.
Hirway, I. (2015). “Unpaid Work and the Economy: Linkages and Their Implications.” The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 58, 1–21. Working-paper version.
Hirway, I., ed. (2017). Mainstreaming Unpaid Work: Time-use Data in Developing Policies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Publisher page.
International Labour Organization. (2018). Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work. Geneva: ILO. Full text.
National Statistical Office. (2025). Time Use Survey 2024: Fact Sheet, January–December 2024. New Delhi: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India. Full text.
Norlock, K. (2019). “Feminist Ethics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Full text.
Nussbaum, M. C. (1999). “Women and Equality: The Capabilities Approach.” International Labour Review, 138(3), 227–245. Full text.
Nussbaum, M. C. (2003). “Poverty and Human Functioning: Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements.” Feminist Economics, 9(2–3), 33–59. Accessible text.
Scales, A. (2009). “Feminist Philosophy of Law.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Archived full text.
Singh, P., and Pattanaik, F. (2020). “Unfolding Unpaid Domestic Work in India: Women’s Constraints, Choices, and Career.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 6, Article 111. Article record.
Sinha, A., et al. (2024). “Well-being Costs of Unpaid Care: Gendered Evidence from a Contextualized Time-Use Survey in India.” World Development, 173, 106419. Article record.
Supreme Court of India. (2025). 2025 INSC 1248. New Delhi: Supreme Court of India. Judgment.
Supreme Court of India. (2026). 2026 INSC 97. New Delhi: Supreme Court of India. Judgment.
UN Women. (2022). A Toolkit on Paid and Unpaid Care Work: From 3Rs to 5Rs. New York: UN Women. Full text.
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