_Interviewer: “In that activity that your husband does growing and selling vegetables, do you get involved?” “Yes, I help him but only a few hours.” (Female respondent, 48 years old, Community ‘Palo Marcado’, Municipality Lepaterique, Department Francisco Morazán)_ _“When they look for me to grind tortillas of others, I do it, but they don’t always look for this. Sometimes they look for me to make nacatamales, but not always ... I used to work in Tegu to sweep, mop, wash clothes, iron, (...) They paid me per month." (Female respondent, FGD, Community ‘Palo Marcado’ Municipality Lepaterique, Department Francisco Morazán)_ “ _I don’t work, I only collect berries, a few that you find in the summer.” (Female respondent, FGD, Palo Marcado, Municipality Lepaterique, Department Francisco Morazán)_

# Implications for survey measurement of employment

The field work reveals that most women of working age in rural Honduras seem to participate in activities that are considered employment, though participation may be only a few hours per week and spread out over a series of different activities. These activities vary from agriculture for own consumption (practically all interviewed women reported have chickens and vegetable gardens in addition to ‘helping’ in their husband’s or other family member’s agricultural enterprises) to direct market work like services for pay and small commerce of food. Yet few of these women readily identify these activities when asked the labor force questions.

The survey suggests some key lessons in designing questionnaires to measure female labor force participation. First, the main employment question specifically refers to renumeration, which can exclude activities where people are not being paid or are not being paid regularly. At the same time, the second question specifically asks about unpaid work. Even so, many women appear to not be reporting activities in response to this question. While these two questions could similarly affect responses from men who work in agriculture without regular income, it does not. Men are overall more confident in defining their daily or even irregular tasks as economic activity compared to women. This reflects the first explanation behind the discrepancy found in this study: the importance of gendered division of work spheres in reporting activities.

Second, both survey questions that measure employment explicitly exclude “housework”. To the extent that women’s household tasks in rural areas include contributions to agricultural production, including this phrase suggests to the respondent a limited scope of what `work’ means to the interviewer, preventing female respondents from reporting activities that could otherwise be seen as `work’. There is significant overlap between the tasks that are understood to be in the domestic sphere by the communities and as “employment activities” by the statistical definitions. The explicit exclusion of household tasks seems to limit women from reporting the multiple economic activities in which they engage at home, even if they receive payment for them directly or indirectly.

Third, part-time or irregular activities are underreported by women even though the Honduran household survey asks about any activity which required an hour or more in the last week. Even so, many women who worked half a day or a day per week in market activities (including activities directly remunerated like laundry services and selling berries to intermediaries) did not consider that to be sufficient time to count as employment. Gender differences in willingness to report these types of irregular activities as 21