Unpaid Family Labor: A Hidden Form of Labor Market Discrimination of Women in Bangladesh

Abstract

In recent decades, Bangladesh has argued to have experienced significant rise in labor market participation of women–from less than 10% during mid-80s female labor force participation has increased to as high as 35.5% in 2015. This figure though quite impressive in comparison to many developing countries, including those of South Asia, there exist concern in terms of quality of work in which they are involved. In this context, unpaid family labor in particular is a common phenomenon of the labor market of Bangladesh where family members are engaged in productive activities of the household where such works do not get any monetary compensation. According to the Labor Force Survey (LFS) 2013 as high as 40.09% of the women who were in the labor force were employed as unpaid family workers, where the corresponding figure for men is only around 4.73%. Due to non-remunerative nature, this type of labor market activities cannot be considered to contribute toward financial empowerment of women and therefore should be treated differently from mainstream paid labor market activities. Unpaid family labor although is a common phenomenon in South Asian countries, it is generally not observed in developed countries with properly functioning labor market. As a result, despite involvement of a significant percentage of workforce—mostly women in unpaid work—this component of the labor force has not been properly studied by the policy-makers or academicians. Besides, despite the non-remunerative feature of such work, the contribution of such labor is expected to be quite high given the magnitude of labor force engaged in such activities. The huge contribution of this unpaid family work especially in the context of Bangladesh therefore needs careful and thorough analysis of strategic policy formulation. In this chapter, with the help of national-level Labor Force Survey data of Bangladesh, an attempt has been made to understand the key features of unpaid family labor and given the dominance of females in such activities, this analysis is restricted only to female unpaid family labor. Besides, through suitable econometric methodology, it has also analyzed and compared the factors determining the choice of unpaid family work by the females as opposed to paid work and/or being not in the labor force.