# **1 Introduction**

Accurately measuring women’s employment is critical to understanding and addressing gender inequality, but this measurement is challenging, particularly in contexts where gender norms undervalue women’s participation in market employment. Especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), a substantial share of employment is informal (La Porta and Shleifer 2014) and thus invisible in administrative data, requiring employment to be estimated from surveys. Although the 19<sup>th</sup> International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) in 2013 adopted clear new guidelines for employment statistics and the definition of employment (ILO 2013), women’s employment is often underreported in surveys. Women may engage in a variety of forms of work. Where the dividing line between market employment, subsistence work, and domestic work is more fluid, women’s employment can be mismeasured if surveys are not carefully designed (Anker 1983; Anker and Anker 1989; Desiere and Costa 2019; Discenza et al. 2021; Durazo et al. 2021; Franck and Olsson 2014; Langsten and Salem 2008; Muller and Sousa 2020).

Past innovations have worked to improve measurement of women’s employment in individuallevel surveys by moving beyond simple keyword detection questions to an activities list or recovery questions to capture more of the “hidden” work done by women (Anker 1983; Anker and Anker 1989; Discenza et al. 2021; Durazo et al. 2021; Langsten and Salem 2008). Keyword questions typically try to detect employment by asking about “work” or a “job” or “main activity.” Women, especially in contexts where gender norms emphasize women’s roles as homemakers, may not consider their employment a job, identifying primarily as housewives, even if helping in a family business or farm (Franck and Olsson 2014; Muller and Sousa 2020).

Activities lists ask respondents if they engaged in specific, often under-detected local activities (e.g. making cheese, butter, or ghee to sell) (Anker and Anker 1989; Langsten and Salem 2008). Past research from the Arab Republic of Egypt has shown the superiority of the individual activities list in capturing work, compared to keyword detection approaches (Langsten and Salem 2008). Recovery questions take a similar approach, asking if the individual was working on a family farm, for example, and whether the products were intended for market (Discenza et al. 2021; Durazo et al. 2021). These innovations can substantially increase estimates of women’s employment, for instance finding 22% more employed women (8.1 percentage points higher employment to population ratio) in Sri Lanka (Discenza et al. 2021). Similarly, Anker and Anker (1989) have shown that estimates of female participation in the market labor force in Egypt can vary from 15% to 34% depending on what questions are asked and whether it is the respondent herself who answers or a proxy.

Innovations to date in detecting women’s employment have focused primarily on improving individual-level questions and the training of enumerators, for instance emphasizing the need to interview the individual herself rather than a proxy respondent. We explore an alternative approach, focused on collecting data on farm and non-farm household enterprises and asking who participates in these activities and in what role, and whether these activities are carried out for the purpose of market exchange or for subsistence purposes. In Egypt, compared to an activities list approach, using data on market activities at the household level and who participated in them, urban women’s employment rate increased from 20 to 24 percent, while rural women’s employment rate increased from 16 to 40 percent (Keo, Krafft, and Fedi 2022).

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