Community work and barter provides everything from child care, sanitation, and health care to community security, housing, informal justice systems, and borrowing and lending. These services provided to households are often 'invisible' so the work is not assisted by the state to make it more efficient. In most societies, women work and live more on the 'border' between the household and the market economy than men. In Central America, Oxfam partners identified the activities which women struggle to balance, such as raising animals, tending gardens, small scale trading, working as servants, and being on school committees. Men were identified by their main economic activity such as coffee-farmer, rancher, or labourer.
Work is done often exclusively by men or women.
Usually men do more technical or mechanised production than women. Even when women initiate new economic projects, they tend to stick to familiar activities like cooking, sewing, cleaning, and child care. For example, an Oxfam partner in Haiti said that women used credit mostly to finance small-scale trading. However, there is often a high supply of such labour-intensive goods and services, so profits are low. Men and women often have different understandings of what work is.