Traditional gender equity interventions, such as financial inclusion programs, vocational training, and cash transfers, often fail to address the root causes of gender disparities, particularly the disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic labor on women. This study evaluates a novel couple and community based intervention designed to reshape intra-household labor allocation, gender stereotypes, and decision-making. Using a randomized controlled trial in Uttar Pradesh, India, we compare two approaches: (1) private couple counseling and (2) private counseling combined with community-based intervention that leverages public accountability and cooperative decision-making. Our findings show that both interventions significantly improve intra-household cooperation, with the community-based gender sensitive intervention (Treatment 2) yielding stronger and more persistent effects. Women in Treatment 2 experienced reductions of about 40 minutes in unpaid domestic chores and 45 minutes in unpaid care, two non-overlapping components of unpaid domestic labor. Participants in both interventions reported significant reductions in domestic violence and shifts in gender stereotypes. Follow-up data collected one year later confirm the persistence of these effects, particularly in reducing unpaid domestic labor and enhancing men’s caregiving roles. Lab-in-the field experiment at endline shows that Treatment 2 increased willingness to trust and reciprocate among both men and women. Results affirm the potential of engaging men and the community in interventions to achieve improvements in gender equity.

Gendered time poverty in rice farming households: Evidence from the haor ecosystem of Bangladesh

For two decades, researchers in the field of ‘gender divisions of domestic labour’ have attended to diversity by studying families with a range of ethnic and racial identities, sexualities, genders (beyond binaries), marital and socioeconomic statuses, and cultures. But one important facet of diversity insufficiently incorporated into much of this research is place, and more specifically, the size, density, and remoteness of the communities in which households are located. Drawing on interviews with eleven families in rural, remote, and small-town places across Canada, in the context of a larger study including families from urban areas, we foreground place in three arguments. First, ‘distance-to-density’ has a direct impact on how families plan and divide paid and unpaid work, the ‘mental load’ of accessing services and amenities, and how households and communities coordinate and carry out childcare. Second, rural communities’ lower population density in some cases means more and different kinds of work – a phenomenon we call ‘the extra work of extra space’ – but also more freedom for some children. Finally, we show how the subjective dimensions of rurality – the ideas that rural places are safer, closer to nature, and more neighbourly – shape household care/work relations and experiences. Attending to rurality’s objective measures and subjective interpretations underscores the importance of understanding how all kinds of community characteristics, including urban ones, affect the logic, negotiations, strategies, meanings, and supports underpinning ‘who does what’ in households and communities.

Paid and Unpaid Productivity Losses Associated with Musculoskeletal Conditions: Longitudinal Evidence from Australia.

Abstract This article examines caregiving inequality in South Korea through an integrated legal‐empirical analysis of the Korean Time Use Survey (KTUS), constitutional interpretation, and family and labor law architecture. Rather than treating low fertility as a policy failure to be corrected, it approaches demographic decline as an aggregation of private choices, or a structural outcome reflecting how caregiving is legally recognized, institutionally allocated, and culturally mediated. Drawing on repeated cross‐sectional data from the 2019–2020 and 2024–2025 cycles of the KTUS, the article demonstrates that marriage has not functioned as a site of gender‐equal redistribution of care. By enabling longitudinal comparison of daily caregiving practices, the Survey serves as an empirical tool for evaluating whether formally gender‐neutral legal entitlements translate into substantive equality in everyday life. Both cycles of the KTUS show that unpaid care work remains persistently feminized within marriage, while caregivers outside legal marriage are structurally excluded from labor‐law protections. The article further analyzes how Korean family and labor law allocate caregiving entitlements through marriage‐ and lineage‐based definitions derived from the Civil Act. Although labor statutes are framed in gender‐neutral terms, parental and spousal leave operate not according to caregiving function, but through compliance with marital form. This structure presumes that marriage reliably organizes care and internalizes dependency—a presumption that is empirically and doctrinally unsustainable. By tracing the interaction between empirical patterns, constitutional principles of equality and dignity, and labor‐law entitlement design, the article argues that formally gender‐neutral caregiving rights produce substantively unequal outcomes when filtered through marital status, raising a constitutional question about whether the adequacy of marital status as the gateway to care protection may continue.

Productivity losses from illness, treatment, and informal caregiving impose a substantial economic burden on patients, caregivers, employers, and society in the United States (US), but measurement remains inconsistent and often omits key domains, such as presenteeism and unpaid non-market work productivity. These gaps limit the integration of productivity into economic evaluations and policy and may lead to undervaluation of interventions that improve health and reduce disease burden. The aim was to identify evidence priorities and methodological improvements for measuring and valuing productivity in US economic evaluations. A targeted literature review (TLR) of US-based studies published from 2020 to 2024 was conducted to evaluate measurement of absenteeism, presenteeism, or unpaid non-market work productivity. Definitions, instruments, valuation methods, and reporting practices were extracted. Findings informed a virtual workshop with eight stakeholders, who completed prioritization exercises and participated in facilitated discussions to refine evidence priorities and methodological recommendations. Thirty studies met the TLR inclusion criteria. Absenteeism was assessed in 77%, unpaid non-market work productivity in 67%, and presenteeism in 37%. The Work Productivity and Activity Impairment questionnaire was used in 40%. Only 30% assessed informal caregiving-related productivity losses, 23% included fringe benefits, and 37% used longitudinal designs. In the workshop, stakeholders prioritized four predefined domains for future evidence generation and value assessment: (1) measuring longitudinal fluctuations in productivity by disease severity; (2) valuing unpaid non-market work productivity; (3) measuring presenteeism; and (4) disaggregating productivity by job types and wfork environments. Recommendations included transparent, perspective-specific valuation; capturing total compensation in absenteeism costs; disaggregating time-based and monetary outcomes; and developing instruments suitable for remote, hybrid, and gig work. Productivity losses are an underrecognized component of disease burden in the US. More consistent use of validated instruments, particularly for measuring longitudinal and unpaid non-market work productivity, may improve the reliability and policy relevance of productivity estimates.

Family members' perspectives of laws, policies and practices in substance use disorder treatment: Systemic alienation of the family in Canada.

This article advances understandings of labour exploitation at the lower end of commercialized agricultural markets, focusing on the experiences of seasonal migrant farmworkers in Turkey. Bringing feminist social reproduction into dialogue with labour regime and critical agrarian scholarship, we examine how household and labour brokerage practices sustain an informalised and fragmented labour regime that straddles production and social reproduction, comprising those activities, relations and resources necessary to sustain life. The analysis draws on qualitative data collected across two major agricultural producing provinces in Turkey between 2017 and 2023. Our findings demonstrate that migrant farm work relies on a continuum of exploitation extending across the farm and the home. Central to this process is the mobilisation of farmworkers' own material resources to survive in makeshift camps, alongside the devaluation and appropriation of women's and girls' unpaid and underpaid labour. Labour brokers govern this continuum by mediating recruitment, retention, and remuneration through the performance of patriarchal family relations, the distribution of advance payments, and gatekeeping access to essential services and resources such as water, food, and healthcare. By internalizing the costs of social reproduction within farmworker households, this regime sustains otherwise untenable labour arrangements, with depleting consequences for farmworkers themselves. By foregrounding the social reproduction dynamics underpinning agrarian labour regimes, the article contributes to rural studies debates on neoliberal agricultural restructuring, migrant farm work, and the gendered organization of work, offering insights relevant to commercial farming contexts in the global South. • Commercial agriculture relies on multiple forms of exploitation beyond the farm. • This article examines households and labour brokerage in Turkey's migrant farm work. • Migrant farm work relies on households' resource transfers and patriarchal norms. • Women and girls bear disproportionate costs, and their work is routinely devalued. • Brokers govern labour through patriarchal relations, advances and resource access.

To assess indirect costs (IDC) due to lost productivity in paid/unpaid labour, stratified by sex, in a national prospective observational multicentre Canadian SLE cohort. Patients from six centres reported on lost productivity in paid/unpaid labour. IDC included: absenteeism (time lost from paid labour because of illness), presenteeism (degree of productivity impairment in paid/unpaid labour) and opportunity costs (additional time patients would be working in paid/unpaid labour if not ill). Opportunity costs were the difference between the time patients reported working and the time worked by an age, sex and geography-matched general population. IDC were valued using Statistics Canada wages (2024 Canadian dollars) with unpaid labour calculated using the opportunity cost method (OCM) and replacement cost method (RCM). The association of sex with IDC components was assessed (adjusted for race/ethnicity, age, disease duration, education and the Systemic Lupus International Collaborating Clinics (SLICC)/American College of Rheumatology (ACR) Damage Index) using regression modelling. Of the 2180 patients who participated, 90.5% were female and 67.1% were white; the mean age at diagnosis was 33.2 years and mean SLE duration was 14.7 years. Patients completed an average of 3.4 questionnaires with 51.2% of women and 47.1% of men employed at baseline. Total annual IDC were significantly higher among women using the OCM (women $35 330; men $32 016) and did not differ using the RCM (women $26 114; men $26 136). Regressions showed total IDC did not differ using either method. Unpaid labour costs were significantly higher among women (OCM: women $22 680; men $11 591 and RCM: women $13 465; men $5711) and paid labour costs were significantly higher among men (women $12 651; men $20 425). Regressions showed similar results. IDC in SLE, particularly resulting from unpaid labour, are substantial, especially in women, where they represent up to 64.2% of total IDC versus 36.2% in men. Hence, economic analyses of novel/emerging therapies should incorporate lost productivity, including unpaid labour costs, which are of particular importance in diseases disproportionately affecting women.

Digital technologies are broadly claimed as inclusive technologies enabling the eradication of various social and economic gaps. Our study builds on the hypothesis that growing cross-and within-country digitalization gradually mitigates multidimensional gender gaps of different backgrounds. According to worldwide statistics (WDI, 2025), developing countries severely suffer from gender inequalities (digital, educational and labor), which negatively affect developing economies` development due to keeping women as “overlooked resource” and being ignored as unpaid domestic labor. This work contributes providing evidence on gender gaps in educational and labor market dimensions; but also, by estimating cross-country inequalities in this regard. By estimating the size of gender gaps, we verify if growing digitalization contributes to gender gaps eradication at the country`s individual level in the group of low-income and lower-middle-income countries. We assess whether cross-country divides in terms of gender gaps are growing or diminishing. Using the World Bank (2025) data, we use the sample of 24 low-income and 46 lower-middle-income countries, in the period from 2000 to 2023. We use a panel dataset encompassing 9 variables – extracted from the World Development Indicators 2025, approximating women's and men's access to digital technologies, education and labor market, including composite indicators delivered by the United Nations Development Programme, approximating gender socio-economic discrimination.

Women in different-sex couples experience larger economic losses after separation than men, largely due to unequal divisions of paid and unpaid work. Women in female same-sex couples divide paid and unpaid work more equally, offering a unique opportunity to examine how partner sex, parenthood, and giving birth shape women's economic outcomes after separation. Using Finnish population register data (2002-2020), we analyze 1,157 women in same-sex couples and 67,384 women in different-sex couples experiencing their first separation. Women in same-sex couples experience smaller reductions in equivalized household income than women in different-sex couples. Among childless women, those in same-sex couples lose substantially less income, consistent with their more equal division of labor. Among parents, women in same-sex couples also lose less than women in different-sex couples, but this difference is explained by birth motherhood. In both couple types, birth mothers lose far more income than nonbirth mothers, reflecting the concentration of caregiving and children's residence in the birth mother's household. Women in same-sex couples have the unique possibility to both give birth, and when they do, they experience smaller income declines after separation, indicating that more equally shared caregiving attenuates economic losses. Overall, women in same-sex couples show that more equal divisions of labor can lessen women's losses after separation, but this advantage is overridden when caregiving and children's residence concentrate in one household. These findings highlight the need for policies that support more equal work-care arrangements and reduce the financial costs tied to concentrated caregiving and birth motherhood.

Using gender-targeted housing subsidies, Brazil’s Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV) program has significantly expanded homeownership among low-income women. However, the latter often face unexpectedly high costs upon becoming homeowners. While existing research shows that burdensome housing costs have adverse socio-economic impacts on beneficiaries of MCMV and similar subsidy programs, this article looks ethnographically at their gendered and disciplinary effects. Drawing on participant observation and interviews in an MCMV-subsidized housing estate in São Paulo, it reveals three effects of cost-burdened homeownership. First, high costs produced deep anxieties and necessitated new budgeting and income-generating practices, augmenting homeowners’ existing burdens of paid and unpaid labor. Second, management of housing costs was experienced as a specifically gendered burden, conferred on women by an avowedly ‘pro-female’ state policy. Third, rather than critique MCMV for imposing high costs, women invoked maternalist state discourses to frame payment as a legitimate obligation that made them respectable citizens and responsible mothers. Bridging the feminist sociology of welfare states with recent work on the disciplinary role of housing policy, this study reveals how programs promoting women’s homeownership can both expand and legitimize unequal gendered burdens.

Abstract This article discusses the localised provision of basic services (health, education, livelihood support) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia, by taking the case of SONJO, a digital mutual aid community in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Through a Foucauldian governmentality analytical lens, we argue that SONJO showcases contradictory ways in which a locally and digitally self-governed community supports citizens’ welfare and well-being during a crisis. On the one hand, the community facilitates redistribution of resources by its leaders and members, ensuring the delivery of social services to those most in need. On the other hand, the community’s activation of localised practices of sambatan— rural Javanese practices of mobilising common resources in time of need—normalises the neoliberal transfer of state responsibilities and decision-making for basic services to citizens. The case study helps unpack the intertwining of neoliberal ideas—which champion individuals as self-reliant actors—and Javanese principles of harmony that emphasise social togetherness, communality, and empathy. Together, they render acceptable the unpaid labour of community members in managing services for fellow citizens within a local context marked by pervasive precarious work, underdeveloped welfare support, and recurrent natural disasters that disrupt livelihoods.

BackgroundMany rural households in South Africa still experience significant challenges regarding provision of potable water even though government policy and legislative framework prioritises delivery of such infrastructure to rural households. Water collection which requires both physical effort and time, is a significant occupation in rural contexts such as in the Limpopo Province.ObjectiveThis paper describes the physical capacity and time demands of water collection for rural dwellers and the implications of this occupation for occupational therapist conducting Functional Capacity Evaluations (FCEs).MethodsA descriptive single case study research methodology was utilised, and data collected during visits to rural homesteads were analysed.ResultsThe findings revealed that all study participants collected water daily from sources outside of their homesteads, including taps in the adjacent streets, village water tanks or nearby rivers. The physical capacity and time required for this occupation exceeds safe limits for industrial manual handling with water collectionConclusionsMany rural dwellers in South Africa and globally continue to need to collect water for survival and hygiene tasks. Occupational therapists conducting FCEs should consider the cumulative impact of unpaid work including water collection in rural settings when evaluating physical capacity and making recommendations regarding compensation.

Understanding shirking behaviour during unpaid overtime periods of uncertain duration remains a fundamental challenge in behavioural economics. While extensive research has examined shirking under standard employment conditions, little is known about how decision-makers respond when they can influence the likelihood of continued unpaid work. This study examines decision-makers who control the duration of unpaid overtime periods under conditions of limited uncertainty about outcomes. Using a comprehensive dataset of 9,018 high-stakes decisions from European football, we find systematic evidence of strategic shirking behaviour when decision-makers face indefinite unpaid overtime. Our analysis reveals that as outcome uncertainty decreases, decision-makers systematically reduce the duration of unpaid overtime periods. The findings provide novel insights into how limited uncertainty and unpaid overtime interact to drive strategic behaviour, with implications for workplace productivity and incentive design in environments where workers control overtime duration.

This article investigates the entanglement of internal migration, penal governance, and urban inequality through the lived experiences of individuals under probationary regimes in Antalya, Turkey. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with 42 participants sentenced to “unpaid work for the benefit of the public” between 2018 and 2022, it analyzes how penal interventions intersect with mobility, labor precarity, and urban marginality. Building on Wacquant's work on advanced marginality and drawing insights from actor-network theory, the study develops a typology of four migration-criminalization trajectories that unsettle border-focused understandings of the migration-control nexus. Migration emerges simultaneously as cause and consequence of penal processes, shaped by exclusion from formal labor, flight from domestic violence, post-detention relocations, and penal-system-induced displacement. Antalya functions as a space of both anonymity and constraint, where probationary conditions compound informal housing and precarious employment. By foregrounding internal mobility within the logics of punishment, the article conceptualizes “constrained mobility” as a penalized form of movement marked by forced stillness, spatial exclusion, and strategic relocation. It contributes to decentering global North-centric debates by showing how punishment, mobility, and marginality are co-produced in semi-peripheral contexts, revealing the spatialized dimensions of criminalization within national borders.

Emerging within the global context of quantification and metric tracking, this study examines a new type of popular music fans in China who self-identify as ‘data fans’. Moving beyond the conventional focus on fans’ affective labour, this article argues that metricisation and gamification form a contemporary regime of consent, through which data fans’ playful engagements are transformed into productive labour and self-governed participation that aestheticise exploitation and naturalise platform control. Drawing on a year-long digital ethnography and 33 semi-structured interviews, the study revisits Burawoy’s concept of manufacturing consent to examine how play functions as a mechanism of voluntary value creation. The analysis unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the gamified design of social media and music platforms binds fans and idols in an accelerated cycle of reciprocal labour. Participation, visibility and productivity become mutually reinforcing, transforming affective devotion into a quantified and competitive game sustained by shared enjoyment and care. Second, platforms manufacture autonomous players who perceive themselves as self-directed participants. These data fans voluntarily devote time, skills, and even personal financial resources to what they regard as ‘bounty-hunting’, generating supra-value beyond conventional unpaid labour. Third, the ‘meta-players’ reinterpret metric production and analysis as gameplay itself, deriving meaning, identity and pride from continuous engagement. The calibrated uncertainty of opaque algorithms sustains their sense of autonomy, rendering playbour both pleasurable and unending. Overall, the study advances a sociological understanding of how digital capitalism manufactures consent through enjoyment, illustrating a paradigmatic shift from lovebour to playbour in the digital fandom.

In the rural Eastern Cape, South Africa, ceremonies depend on the unpaid labour of young wives (omakoti). The expectation that omakoti will perform this work is connected to patriarchal and gerontocratic social norms. During the Covid-19 pandemic, ceremonies were banned temporarily. The impact that this had on omakoti’s unpaid labour was variable: those whose households adhered to lockdown policies enjoyed a respite from this work, while those whose households ignored the rules experienced more dangerous unpaid working conditions. In this article, we explore the impact of these pandemic-related changes, in omakoti’s working conditions at ceremonies, on their attitudes towards gendered unpaid labour expectations at rituals. We pay particular attention to how this impact was differentially experienced by uneducated rural wives (traditional omakoti) and so-called modern omakoti who struggle to balance paid work with unpaid domestic labour. We also explore the tactics that these subcategories of omakoti deployed to navigate the challenges of upholding gendered labour expectations. In so doing, we contribute to broader anthropological conversations about changing meanings and community-level negotiations about rural women’s unpaid labour under conditions of gerontocracy and patriarchy, about the impact of the pandemic on social life, and about the unintended impacts of South Africa’s Covid-19 policies.

Abstract Victim participation in criminal justice is usually studied as a legal right, a democratic opportunity, or a restorative justice measure. Drawing on evidence from the International Criminal Court’s victim engagement in Kenya and Uganda, I instead conceptualize victim participation as a form of unpaid labour. Building on Marxist-feminist theory, I argue that we do not usually recognize victims’ labour because of the ‘who’ (victims), the ‘what’ (participation) and the ‘why’ (justice) of victim participation. I then make the case for why we should pay ‘wages for victim participation’, drawing on the Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, not only to compensate victims for their labour time but also to open a broader political perspective on life-making, work and justice.

This article aims to examine how the category of labour is presented in Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). In the Marxian understanding, labour is the fundamental category of human sociability. Under capitalism, it is presented as a moment of exploitation, domination and oppression. The centrality of labour in capitalism’s historicity has been examined differently within feminist and Marxist approaches. Within feminism, the so-called dual systems theories have often dissociated oppression and exploitation, resulting in a fragmented analytical framing of the category of labour. Part of Marxism, in turn, has directed its investigations towards productive wage labour, failing to delve into an analysis of reproductive labour, especially the unpaid domestic labour. Thus, this analysis fails to see the relationship between production and social reproduction under capitalism. Based on Marx’s category of totality, SRT expands its analytical focus and examines the social reproductive work in its integrative relationship to waged productive labour. Thus, in our view, SRT provides theoretical advances by pointing towards a unitary theory of understanding the relationship between exploitation and oppression in capitalism, without resorting to factors that are external to the capital’s dynamics to explain oppression. We consider that SRT enables the development of some key issues within Marxist feminism, such as the place and function of the sexual division of labour; the analytical and Marxist framing of unpaid domestic work; the contradictory-but-necessary relationship between production and social reproduction; political struggles, among others. To demonstrate this theoretical advance, we examine the debate within feminist currents of Marxism, such as materialist feminism and autonomist feminism, to characterise their divergences. Finally, we argue that the expanded conception of labour within the Marxian reading proposed by SRT offers a more enriching and accurate Marxian reading for the political-theoretical analyses of the expressions of class struggle in the 21st century.