September 18, 2025
DHAKA – As per a recent survey report made public on September 9, in Bangladesh, unpaid work overall was valued at Tk 670,000 crore in 2021, which was equivalent to 18.9 percent of the country’s GDP. Of that work, women performed 85 percent—equivalent to Tk 570,000 crore or 16.14 percent of GDP. The survey was conducted by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) and UN Women Bangladesh, with support from the global Women Count programme and technical assistance from the Asian Development Bank (ADB). The survey, the first ever Household Production Satellite Account (HPSA), drew on data from the Time Use Survey 2021 and Labour Force Survey (LFS) 2022.
The report follows on the pledge made by the current government in the FY2025-26 budget to integrate unpaid labour into official GDP calculations. However, this is the result of many years of advocacy and lobbying by women’s and development organisations to monetise women’s unpaid work and give it a formal recognition. This is a landmark step in favour of millions of women who perform essential services yet remain out of the national accounting system.
Efforts to ascribe a monetary value to women’s unpaid care and household work have been a topic of global discussion over the last few decades. An Oxfam report released in 2019, before the commencement of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting, states that unpaid work done by women across the globe amounts to $10 trillion a year—43 times the annual turnover of Apple, the world’s biggest company!
In Bangladesh, this effort has been spearheaded by researchers and several organisations, such as Manusher Jonno Foundation (MJF), Bangladesh Mahila Parishad, Oxfam, ActionAid, etc. The earliest recorded comprehensive research on women’s unpaid care work in Bangladesh was conducted by M Hamid in 1996, which used the replacement cost valuation method to estimate its economic value. The pilot Time Use Survey was conducted by the BBS in 2012, followed by the first national Time Use Survey in 2021, supported by UN Women.
Meanwhile, the demand grew for not only ascribing monetary value to unpaid care work but for according it a formal recognition by including it in the national GDP calculations. This demand was met with scepticism by economists who explained that GDP is calculated using the international standard method called System of National Accounts (SNA), and products not marketed cannot be included in it.
Meanwhile, a study conducted in 2014 by the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) for MJF revealed that, on an average, a female member of a household undertakes 12.1 non-SNA activities, while the corresponding figure for a male member is only 2.7. Using the replacement method, the study goes on to summarise that if women’s unpaid work were to be monetised, it would amount to 2.5 to 2.9 times higher than the income of women received from paid work.
In our search to find a solution to the SNA issue, we came across examples from countries such as Mexico, India and South Africa, which have used satellite accounts to calculate women’s unpaid care work and have successfully shown its estimation in their GDP calculations.
The BBS survey is a critical effort to give value to women who work behind closed doors—work that is both productive and reproductive but does not get recognised, valued or honoured. The lack of recognition of women’s unpaid work has led to their marginalisation as a productive force, even though they are by and large responsible for the food security, health and well-being of their families and communities. The invisibility of their contributions has led to their devaluation and them not getting the honour and respect they deserve at home and society. The high rates of domestic violence is also a result of their lesser status within the households. The most telling image that comes to mind is the famous poster by Banchte Shekha, which depicts a woman with 12 hands, each doing a task: cooking, cleaning, taking care of cattle and poultry, tending to the sick, etc. Under the poster reads the line, “My wife does not work.” Again, if you ask a homemaker, “Do you work?”, she will answer, “No, I don’t work.”
It is this mindset that has to change. A positive image surrounding women’s work needs to be created by highlighting their contributions and changing the tag line on the Banchte Shekha poster from “My wife does not work” to “Yes, my wife works; in fact, she works more than I do!” The definition of work is that if you get remuneration, it is work, and if you don’t, then it is not work but tasks you are supposed to perform. Who performs these unaccounted, unrecognised tasks? Women, of course. As per the Time Use Survey 2021, women spend 7.3 times more time on unpaid household and care work than men. Despite being essential to the well-being of the family, this work has largely remained invisible and outside national accounts.
However, merely calculating the monetary value of unpaid care and household work is not enough. It is only the first step towards the long journey of achieving equal rights and status of women within households and society. The BBS report has put forward a number of recommendations which should be implemented if women are to gain from this path-breaking survey. First, an inter-ministerial mechanism should be set up to integrate unpaid work into laws and policies, prioritising care in the national budget for sustained financing as well as regular data collection. Most importantly, however, we have to challenge social norms and practices that undervalues household work and sees it only as “women’s work.” For this, massive campaigns and dissemination strategies are needed to spread the findings of this report and emphasise the contribution of women in all its dimensions. There is an urgent need to recognise, reduce and redistribute care work to free up women to undertake activities and tasks of their choice.
Finally, we indeed want more and more women to develop skills and enter the job market for employment, and that employment has to ensure a living wage, and be decent and secure. However, the reality in Bangladesh, especially the rural areas, is that millions of women will remain at home, either by choice or compulsion, performing essential services, silently, behind the scene, contributing to the harmony and well-being of their families. It is to those women that we pay our respect, and hope this BBS report, through implementation of its recommendations, will succeed in enhancing their status within their families and contribute to creating a more gender-equal and just society.
Shaheen Anam is executive director at Manusher Jonno Foundation.
Views expressed in this article are the author’s own.