Accurate measurement of employment and the labor force is critical for guiding well targeted and timely policy making. Indicators like labor force participation, employment, and unemployment measure the degree to which segments of a population engage in economic activities. These are widely used to design and implement programs central to economic development – such as programs that tackle youth unemployment or programs that aim to boost access to markets for small producers. In addition, because a significant component of household income is from employment, inaccurate measurements of employment can lead to mismeasurement of household income. Biased or incomplete identification of these critical indicators can lead to misrepresentations of growth, social development, and poverty.

At the same time, the distinction between employment and economic activity on one hand and other tasks that can increase the well-being of households on the other hand is not always obvious. Small-scale agricultural production for own consumption is a clear example of where the distinction between the two may fail – these are activities that can result in production which may or may not be used for economic exchange. On top of these conceptual difficulties in economic measurement, there are also contextspecific definitions of which activities are considered work and who can be a worker. Through these definitions, gender roles and the allocation of household tasks across genders can have a significant impact on the robustness of official employment statistics.

The underreporting of women’s economic contributions and work has long been recognized as impacting labor force statistics and national accounts estimates (Boserup 1970, Anker 1983, Beneria 1981, Dixon 1982, Donahoe 1999, Mata-Greenwood 2000). Researchers argue that the very definition of employment excludes some activities that are typically performed by women, including some types of informal activities and domestic work. However, even _within_ activities that are included in the definition of employment, women’s participation is undercounted because of how the concept of ‘employment’ is operationalized in surveys and how respondents understand it. This has resulted in a systematic underestimation of women’s involvement in agricultural work, especially self-employment and seasonal or part-time work that takes place within the home or family enterprise.<sup>4</sup> Not counting these contributions can have important policy implications by affecting the project design and implementation of productivity enhancing interventions (Koolwal 2019). For example, a participatory study in two Honduran communities in the 1990s showed that male extension workers did not think it was important to deliver extension services to women because agriculture was not a large part of their work (Colverson 1995).

In this study, we consider the specific case of participation rates of women in rural Honduras with the aim of understanding how women engage in economic activities in these communities and, importantly, the reasons why some of these activities are not accurately captured in the official statistics. Despite high poverty rates and a largely agriculture-based economy, female labor force participation in rural Honduras in 2015 was estimated at 39 percent, compared to 90 percent for men.<sup>5</sup> Closer inspection of the data reveals lower participation rates for women whose partners are self-employed or employers in agriculture – that is, low labor participation of women in farm-owning households. Due to the nature of small-scale agriculture, which often relies on active participation from most family members, the fact that these women report especially low levels of participation is puzzling.

> 4 There are numerous survey studies that show the underestimation of women’s work, including: in India (Anker 1983), in the Arab Republic of Egypt (Anker and Anker 1989, Langsted and Salen 2008), In Cameroon, Mali and Senegal (Comblon and Robilliard 2017), in Tanzania (Bardasi et al 2011), and in Malaysia (Karlsson and Olsson 2014).

> 5 Authors’ tabulations for the population age 15 and older using the 2015 Honduras Multipurpose Household Survey (EPHPM).

2