Improving the Measurement of Women’s Work: The Contribution of Demographic Surveys in Francophone West Africa

Abstract

Since the 1970s, the measurement and recognition of women’s work and their contributions to family well-being and economic development have been a matter of academic interest, as well as feminist advocacy. The interrelationships between women’s work and demographic processes, especially decisions regarding fertility, have also attracted the attention of demographers for some time. However, despite long-standing efforts to capture all aspects of women’s work, large-scale demographic and economic surveys conducted in the Global South still fail to approach work as a gendered concept and continue to make much of women’s labor invisible. The measurement of unpaid care and household responsibilities is particularly scarce. In such a context, the purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, it retraces the long history of the global efforts of feminist scholars and activists to enhance the measurement of women’s work. Second, it illustrates how recent data collection initiatives in francophone West Africa, building on the experience of collaborative research conducted by demographers in the region since the 1970s, have attempted to fill some of the persisting gaps in data on women’s activity, especially on household domestic and care, voluntary collective/community work, as well as on women’s contribution to household expenses and family support.