themselves or the household” or “helped without being paid in any kind of business run by the household”, but in other surveys, “running or helping” in a business is asked in one question. The ILO LFS pilot study findings also recommend maintaining separate questions for running versus contributing family work in a business, to better identify household members’ roles (Benes and Walsh, 2018a), although similar care needs to be taken in the guidance and framing of questions to ensure that respondents do not default to traditional gender norms where women are always considered as “helping” in the business and men are “running” the business, even if their roles are similar.

## Summary and ways forward

Rural women’s employment can be underreported in employment surveys, owing to multiple factors including their concentration in informal and seasonal work, social norms about how they view their labor contributions, and other domestic responsibilities they are engaged in. Box 3 summarizes key points highlighted in this section.

Box 3. Summary: Ways forward on counting rural women’s work

- Boundary questions that distinguish between market- and own-use production in agriculture are crucial under the 19th ICLS. Further exploration is needed on adapting these questions to account for seasonality, as well as proxy reporting.

- Within off-farm wage work, amid shrinking land ownings and rising seasonal work on farms, asking about traditional forms of casual labor on others’ farms that may be missed by standard questions on wage employment is also important (as in the case of _ganyu_ in Malawi, where rural women wage workers across most age groups are almost entirely concentrated).

- Greater attention is needed to how questions are framed around self-employment, to identify individuals running a farm/enterprise separately from contributing family work.  Owing to social norms and other time burdens, rural women are more likely to underreport this work.  Recovery questions have also been shown to be particularly effective in re-classifying women as contributing family workers, when they initially report not being employed.

# III. Labor underutilization and time use

## Labor underutilization

Given the narrower definition of employment under 19th ICLS, and the role of seasonality in rural jobs, the 19th ICLS recommends collecting data on two measures of labor underutilization — time-related underemployment , and the potential labor force — to better understand outcomes for individuals who would like to work more, or are out of the labor force.

Time-related underemployment refers to whether individuals in employment, over a short reference period (a) wanted to work additional hours, (b) whose working time in all jobs was less than a specified hours threshold, and (c) who were available to work additional hours given an opportunity for more work (ILO, 2013; para 4).<sup>4</sup> Time-related underemployment has significant bearing on women as well; often when women get paid jobs, for example, their household responsibilities do not decline, and they are more likely to work part-time even if they wanted to work more (Folbre, 2018).

> 4 The 19th ICLS also provides guidance on how to construct different thresholds based on working hours (ILO, 2013).

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