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the economy that do not come into markets or any sort of metric,” Ramnarain says, “but which are still very essential to social reproduction and human life. That is, these are the activities that reproduce society and the next generations of people.” The unpaid, or reproductive, labor largely assigned to women due to gender norms— which includes maintenance and upkeep of the home, caregiving for children and family, cooking, fetching water, collecting fuel and fodder, providing education, and beyond—is vital but remains invisible in both data and policy. Society tends to value paid work in the labor market more so than equally necessary work carried out in the home or private sphere; women are generally considered responsible for the latter. “Their work,” Ramnarain says of these women, “is actually really essential, and they provide necessary and crucial services toward the reproduction of life and society, but is not reflected in the economic data we collect.”

These data influence policymakers. When a whole constituency is absent from our economic assessment, the result is ineffective policy, even if well-intentioned, that fails to adequately bridge the gender gap. Ramnarain also is concerned with women in nontraditional households (such as female headed households), the labor force participation of women, and the distribution of women’s reproductive labor in the household. “The idea behind this kind of work is to highlight what is hitherto invisible in economics statistics and therefore in policymaking. I also want to understand how these policies impact women.” One of her many recent projects considered widow-headed households in post-conflict Nepal. Many widows were being offered training for employment, but those skill-development and training programs often taught handicrafts. “These were not really a sustainable form of income-generation,” Ramnarain says.

SMITA RAMNARAIN Associate Professor Economics

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