By Rachael Goodman and Sarah Kaplan
Bringing more women into the formal workforce is an important component of corporate strategies, development efforts, and the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, these policies often do not consider the household work that women already do to support the survival of their families, making work-for-wages impossible or creating time famines for women who attempt to do both. Thus, for women to engage in work-for-wages, they must find a way to alleviate their work-for-households. Using the analytical lens of household decision-making from anthropology, our analysis of working women in rural India shows that, far from being an individual decision about time allocation, women’s ability to work formal jobs was a family project to reallocate labor. These insights suggest that the focus on the individual in work–life balance literature and policy-making inadequately represents a phenomenon that involves other household members, implicitly or explicitly. It also highlights the need to broaden our definition of “work” to include both the paid and unpaid labor that is vital to people’s survival.
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