Poverty rates are high among these households; understanding the reasons behind these low levels of economic activity is critical for identifying pathways out of poverty. On one hand, it could be that the high labor intensity of household tasks in areas with few services keeps women from actively contributing to agriculture or other market-oriented activities. On the other hand, these low rates could reflect an undermeasurement of female economic activity. With this in mind, the study explores two complementary questions designed to improve the quality of labor statistics in highly informal areas. First, the study aims to identify women’s activities and their labor intensity (time and effort), including: 1) work done outside of the home, both paid and unpaid; 2) production activities undertaken in the home to increase income or consumption; and 3) tasks undertaken to increase the well-being of the household, such as childcare, cooking, cleaning, and fetching water. Second, the study seeks to understand how individuals in these communities determine which activities and tasks are identified as “work” or “employment”.

The study finds that most women who report not being economically active are in fact participating in various types of economic activities, including production for own consumption, production of market goods, and remunerated market activities in services and commerce. Most women in the study reported working the equivalent of a part-time schedule across different economic activities, including agriculture, commerce, and services for pay. Based on the finding that many women consider their economic activities as part of their household tasks, simulations suggest that the rural female labor force participation rate in Honduras is more likely between 50.1 and 66.4 percent, depending on the assumptions applied.

The study identifies two main explanations behind this observed discrepancy. First, women are identifying themselves (and being identified by others) primarily as housewives, and the concepts of housewife and employment are taken as mutually exclusive. Second, given this duality between housework and employment, women define ‘employment’ based on a set of necessary characteristics that exclude many of their own activities. For it to be employment, work needs to i) be conducted physically outside the home; ii) be in exchange for money, this applies to both services and goods; and iii) entail sufficient time commitment. Importantly, these conditions are not binding constraints for men to identify their own activities as economic activity. These results have implications for understanding the low labor force participation of women in rural communities in countries beyond Honduras, suggesting that the low rates hide a significant amount of economic and non-economic work.

# **Literature survey**

Employment and labor force indicators are designed to measure the percentage of the working age population engaged in economic activities, both those who are employed and those who wish to be employed. There is a long literature on the mismeasurement of women’s engagement in economic activities and the labor force, both due to underreporting of women’s participation in some activities as well as the exclusion of activities undertaken primarily by women from the definitions used for labor force statistics (Boserup 1970, Anker 1983, Beneria 1981, Dixon 1982, Donahoe 1999, Mata-Greenwood 2000). In this study, we focus on the first of these reasons – the underreporting of women’s participation in activities that are counted towards employment statistics.

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