REVALUATION OF WOMEN'S WORK IN BANGLADESH

Abstract

The paper seeks to revalue women's nonmarket work in the context of parts of rural Bangladesh, v} ich is where most of her women folk live. It raises relevant conceptual and methodological considerations relating to revaluation of women's work, reviews various sets of evidence on the pattern of time use of women in Bangladesh, and then puts up a broad order of magnitude as to the value of women's nonmarket work. For this purpose, it taken the sexual division of labour and sexual differential in rates of wages as given. The paper shows that rural women in Bangladesh work as hard, if anything harder, as mm on a daily basis. It also shows the widespread sexual distribution of labour in the sense of involving the influence of social stereotypes in the allocation of tasks between males and females. Finally, it shows that productive work within households consists of market work, typically by men, and a good deal of subsistence work and domestic work performed by women.