Shirin M. Rai, Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring, Oxford University Press, 2024. Pbk £18.99.
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Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring builds on a project previously pursued in joint articles (Hoskyns and Rai 2007; Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas 2014), and rooted in earlier work by Diane Elson (1998, 2000). Its topic - the 'everyday' depletion arising from social reproduction - is original and important, but its impact is limited because Rai adopts a narrowly based micro-level focus without adapting the original analytical framework to match, applies it to a very small number of individual narratives, and entirely drops the initial focus on recasting the global political economy (Hoskyns and Rai 2007:310, below). I suggest that to realise its full potential some readjustments are called for.
| Recasting the global political economy.pdf |
Elson offered a holistic account of social reproduction, informed by a critique of mainstream economics and national accounting systems and their failure to address the significance of unpaid domestic labour, in which the public sector regulates the relationship between profit-seeking by the private sector and provisioning by the domestic sector (1998: 194). Hoskyns and Rai drew on her models of flows in the global economy to depict the depletion of domestic sector resources and capabilities and the fragmentation of public sector functions and services, each exacerbated by economic restructuring and cuts in public spending. Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas developed the notion of ‘depletion through social reproduction’ (DSR), defining it as ‘the level at which the resource outflows exceed resource inflows in carrying out social reproductive work over a threshold of sustainability, making it harmful for those engaged in this unvalued work’. Depletion could be said to occur if the stock of resources available to replenish SR (such as health for the individual, income for the household or networks for the community) reached a ‘tipping point’, and fell below a threshold of sustainability (Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas 2014: 88-9). They identified four kinds of ‘gendered harm’ that arose from the failure to recognise and value women’s unpaid work, along with three fluid and overlapping strategies through which depletion might be reversed: discursive harm occurred ‘through negating work in the domestic sector, while affirming gendered social hierarchies and distinctions of class and race’ (91); emotional harm involved ‘the guilt associated with being a “working mother” and in the undermining of the capacities of the “housewife” to act as agent in her own right’; bodily harm, ‘as in the (non-)regulation of the working body within the home’, took place ‘through gendered regimes which allow multiple births and abortions, lack of sleep and leisure and injuries during daily work which are often characterized as being the result of “carelessness” and seen as episodic rather than as related to work’; and harm to citizen entitlements occurred when ‘with the non-recognition of SR, and the DSR that accrues through it, groups are constituted as “non-contributors” to the economy and therefore, although the recipients of its welfare, perhaps not entirely worthy of entitlements as citizens’ (92).
Mitigation, the least radical of the three strategies, took place when individuals ‘attempted to lessen the consequences of DSR by, for example, paying for help or sharing tasks across genders. Adopting mitigating strategies would include paying others to do tasks such as childcare and cleaning, using labour saving appliances and buying convenience foods’, 98-9). Replenishment (following Elson, 2000) took place where states or private bodies contributed to inflows that went some way to lessen the effects of DSR without necessarily recognizing it as harmful: ‘This would involve such state measures as tax breaks, state benefits and regulation of conditions of work, as well as the ready availability of health care and free schooling’ (99). Transformation, in contrast, implied structural change:
‘There are two aspects to transformation. The first is the restructuring of gendered social relations. This would mean, for example, both men and women being fully involved in the sharing of SR. This would transform not only the lives of millions of women who largely bear the burden of this work today, but would also mean the restructuring of wider social relations, as gender based inequalities outside the home are challenged to equalize social reproductive work. The second aspect of transformation is the issue of the recognition and valuation of SR and therefore of DSR’ (99).
Between Elson (1998) and Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas (2014), something significant was lost. Elson explored ‘feedbacks between the domestic, the political and the economic which are obscured by conventional political economy’ (190), setting ‘depletion’ in a holistic macro-level structural perspective. She placed particular emphasis on the role of the domestic sector in the production of a ‘productive and willing labour force’ (206), with all that implied in terms of physical and human capital, and argued that its capacity to make provision both for its own needs and those of the other sectors was compromised if unpaid and largely female labour was treated as a bottomless well, always available as a shock absorber or safety net of last resort. From this perspective, spending cuts and economic restructuring appeared to promote efficient growth, but were in fact likely to undermine the conditions for it in the longer term. The focus, in other words, was squarely on the role of the domestic sector in the social reproduction of a productive working class:
‘The production of labour capacities (physical, technical and social) depletes human energies, which need replenishing if the level of labour services is to be maintained. Replenishment requires inputs from the public and private sectors. The domestic sector cannot be seen as a bottomless well upon which the other sectors can draw: unless the inputs from the public and private sector are sufficiently nourishing, human capacities and provisioning values will be destroyed and they will drain away …’ (203).
Hoskyns and Rai (2007) and Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas (2014) took two successive steps away from this holistic focus centred on the dual role of the domestic sector. The 2007 article depicted a global economy with the private sector and wages at its centre (Figure 1 above), but moved away from the problematic of the role of social reproduction in the production of the working class, defining it more generally as ‘the glue that keeps households and society together and active’ (297). The 2014 article dropped Elson’s model of the global economy completely, arguing (wrongly) that she studied the consequences of neglect of SR ‘largely … in the context of economic crises’ (86), and went on from there to develop the concept of depletion in the manner summarised above.
Even so, the break with feminist political economy generally and the measurement of depletion in particular in Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring comes as a surprise. At the very start Rai unequivocally signals a shift from macro-structural political economy to a micro-level approach based upon individual stories:
‘Meera walks to work; she climbs over a fence to save 20 minutes because the gated community that she works in has shut all gates but one, which makes her journey longer. She does this because she needs to finish her work quickly in order to be able to collect her children from school and go home to do all the household chores before helping her children with their homework and then making dinner’ (1).
Call it what you will - an epistemological break, a methodological shift, or an embrace of the everyday - this opening move could not be more dramatic. The previous approach is immediately called into question, and the introduction and chapters 1 and 2 (1-76) set out the new in close dialogue with the old. Two chapters on eight women in New Delhi from varied class backgrounds (of whom Meera is one) are then followed by one on twenty children in Coventry (West Midlands, UK) who are carers for differently abled or sick parents and grandparents, and one on a community in Eastern Cape, South Africa, whose access to land and way of life are threatened by a proposed mining investment (77-194). A brief conclusion follows. Rai still argues that ‘our lives, and the lives of future generations, are dependent on the work we call social reproduction, the reproduction of life itself, which can be and is being eroded through depletion’ (3), but she does so by focusing on a very few individuals, in three situations. The book, she says, makes four arguments:
‘first, that the unequal system of social reproduction that leads to depletion harms those who care. This harm through depletion is multifaceted and affects everyone engaged in social reproduction, but unequally, and affects life that needs to be sustained and reproduced. Second, the strategies of reversing harm cannot be successful if society as a whole - states, markets, individuals, nonstate and collective actors - does not acknowledge in measurable ways this harm. Further, mitigatory strategies alone for reversing depletion can only be limited and unequal and indeed can intensify harm for some. State intervention in addressing the unequal distribution of social reproductive work is essential, if not sufficient, for replenishment as a strategy of reversal of harm. Third, a vision of a “good life” for all, rather than for only some, must include human as well as planetary care. Depletion of our environment is entangled with capitalism’s pursuit of cheap nature … and harms us and future generations … . Fourth, the recognition of depletion as harm must recognize the location and histories of inequalities that cast long shadows on the current care regime - race, gender, and class are vectors of this inequality’ (3-4).
The first part of the book reflects at length, then, on the agenda set out in Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas (2014), endorsing some aspects and sidelining others. The focus on individuals, households and communities, the four kinds of gendered harm arising from the failure to recognise and value women’s unpaid socially reproductive work, and the three strategies through which depletion might be reversed remain central (Figure 1.1, p. 31). But the comprehensive mapping of flows in the global political economy (Figure 1 above) has gone for good, and the attempt to measure DSR is addressed but set aside, with five issues that hamper measurement noted: the irregular and uneven nature of depletion; the problem of aggregating different forms of depletion at different levels in different contexts; the complications arising from the mix of finite and renewable resources in social reproductive work; the need for methodologies and units of measurement that are valid across different sites and North/South boundaries; and the presence of ‘gendered desirability biases’ in existing data sets (56-7):
‘These difficulties alerted me to the importance of critically assessing the potential of the model that we presented; in this book, I have not measured depletion using the model. Rather, I have disclosed its presence in different registers, argued for its recognition and compensation, and suggested ways of reversing it through individual strategies, collective struggles, and policy shifts’ (58).
Following this lengthy review Rai introduces the Feminist Everyday Observation Tool (FEOT):
‘In developing alternative strategies of researching depletion, I traded the scale of study for a focus on measuring time accurately, taking into account “social time” and reflexive time, location and context. I developed a method that also considered the time poverty of those engaged in both paid and unpaid work, as well as their educational levels. I worked with this methodology in 2016 (see Chapters 3 and 4) and used the experience to refine it further, together with my colleague Jacqui True; we called this method/ology the Feminist Everyday Observatory [now Observation] Tool (FEOT) (Rai and True 2020)’ (71-2).
This is ‘a narrative methodology that builds on both the epistemic histories of quantitative and qualitative research and one that pays attention to identities and subjectivities as well as structures of inequality and possibilities of change. While mapping time through a survey provides us with important insights, it does not allow us to explore the textures and rhythms of everyday life/work and their effects and how subjectivities are framed through this work, which in turn affect our sense of self’ (72):
‘FEOT can have only a small sample size because it is labor-intensive and therefore does not provide the evidence at scale, but it can deepen our understanding of the everyday rhythms of life, the nuanced relationship between paid and unpaid labor, the social and familial networks that embed those performing social reproduction and insights into the subjectivities of those doing this work. As such, it not only provides us with time-use data - qualitative, thick description, reflexive - but also allows us to ask different questions about social reproduction and its costs’ (73).
The FEOT has three steps (pre-questionnaire, observation, and post-observation narrative interview); the observer shadows the subject, fills out a time diary in 15-20 minute intervals for a 12-16 hour day, and notes such features as multitasking, and interaction with other household members. It is deployed in a ‘preliminary’ version in Chapters 3 and 4, in part in Chapter 5 (on the reasonable grounds that it would not have been appropriate to shadow child carers), and not at all in Chapter 6, which relies instead on a set of photographs and ‘postcards’ produced by Thom Pierce (Postcards from Xolobeni).
So, Chapter 3 reports on the application of a ‘prefigurative’ (16) and at that point un-named ‘early version’ of the FEOT, focused on ‘the everyday rhythms of doing social reproductive and paid labor by eight women, across time and space as well as class boundaries in one randomly chosen working/school day of their lives in New Delhi’ (78). The fieldwork was carried out by a research assistant, Pujya Ghosh, over four months in 2016, and involved a cross-class sample of eight women (two upper-middle, two middle, two lower-middle and two working class), all in heterosexual marriages, five in paid work, and six with children, two without.
This is our first encounter with empirical research material, and a puzzle immediately presents itself: on the crucial issue of depletion there is a glaring mismatch between the evidence from fieldwork and the conclusions Rai draws from it. These are key points from the summary that concludes the chapter:
‘Through time-use diaries, shadowing/observation, and interviews we find that depletion takes the form of physical exhaustion, mental stress, and social isolation in a context of patriarchal, gendered distribution of social reproductive work. … Depletion is a red thread that goes through this everyday landscape--tiredness, exhaustion, lack of recognition, the relentlessness of their work are all mentioned by each and every one of them in different contexts. … The women in these stories are … socially embedded but self-aware and engaged subjects who accept and carry the responsibilities of social reproduction with limited resources that they nurture, to stretch and to add to as they try to mitigate the depleting effects of social reproductive work’ (103, 105, 106, emphasis mine).
Really? Mamta, an ‘upper-class homemaker’ with two children and domestic help, reports having felt stressed in the past, and has joined an art class for relaxation. She likes watching Grey’s Anatomy, but laments that time is so short that “I can’t even get a pedicure” (94). Luckily, her husband ‘is a big support, and takes care of things when she is out with friends: “He never stops me … not that I take his permission [giggles]; I just tell him; but even then, he never says don’t go”’. She somehow finds the time to participate in car rallies, ‘and goes away for two days and her husband would work from home and let her enjoy” (101). And she confides that whenever she feels ‘overwhelmed’, ‘I say quietly [to her husband] that I will go either to my mom or mother-in-law for a night’ (103). Bindu, an ‘upper-class working woman’ with no children, reports that ‘I spend quite a bit of time on myself; I do yoga every morning for half an hour and spend two hours at my gym everyday and at the end of the day I watch TV; but mostly I am running around for others’ (94); She has domestic help at home, but says that her life would improve ‘outside if I had a driver; I drive myself. I feel I would then be able to use that time to make my phone calls [for work]’ (86). She grumbles that her husband often brings guests for meals without notice, and only thinks of her as a housewife (102).
Neela, a ‘middle-class homemaker’ with one child, rises at nine, and says: “Maximum two hours I spend on myself a day; I like doing crochet and reading books when I get time. Yoga, I won’t count because Ananya [her one-year-old daughter] is always around, and that is too distracting; anyway it doesn’t happen on a daily basis” (94). Her husband doesn’t help with the child, and for example won’t change her when she wets herself (102). In contrast, Sabina, a childless middle-class journalist, ‘reflects that she doesn’t do as many things for herself as she would like to. For instance, she would like to go for a walk, but that usually doesn’t happen because there is no time. She tries to do yoga three times a week. She reads on the metro, so that’s something she does for herself. On weekends, she gets a chance to meet her friends and unwind, but through the week there is no such option’ (95). Her husband shares the domestic work, cooking the dinner and helping to clearing up afterwards (101). She also has a maid, but reports that although she enjoys her work she gets so tired that she sometimes falls asleep on the metro (100).
Sangeeta, a ‘(? lower-)middle-class working woman’ with two children, is now a nursery teacher after ten years as a ‘homemaker’. She reports that her husband supports and appreciates her, and that he helps in the house, goes to the market, and does the ‘outside work’ (101). Suneeta, a lower-middle-class office worker with one child, ‘depends on her older sister and her friends for support: I share everything with didi [elder sister], which makes me feel relaxed. . . . [W]e don’t have the time to meet every weekend, even every other weekend, but now we have phones so we talk. . . . [S]ometimes I see her with my daughter, sometimes with my husband. . . . [W]e meet every other month. . . . I meet my friends in the mall . . . we have a WhatsApp group and we fix place and time to meet. . . . [When I go with my friends] I leave my daughter with my husband [giggles]” (93).
So far, then, the husbands are a mixed bunch, but there is little evidence either of patriarchy, or of depletion. The situation of the working class women is different. Meera, a domestic worker with two children (the one who hops over a fence to save time on her walk to work) used to work in Dubai, where ‘she really enjoyed herself’ (93). She finds it hard to come home to her own housework after her morning stint in the nearby gated community, but also reports that with her income and that of her husband, they make ends meet and she is able to save: “I only help; my husband earns. … [H]is salary comes on the seventh; if we need money on the first then my money helps; even without that, I can help the children I have opened accounts for five hundred rupees for the girl and the boy. … [T]his way we don’t have to ask others” (99). Deepa, a working-class ‘homemaker’ with two children who has never done paid work, also has a busy day. Without a car, she walks her two daughters to school and picks them up, at different times, and in all her day stretches from 5.30-45 to close on midnight. She does find time to walk on her own for recreation twice a day though, and spend an hour with her daughters in a park, and watches TV for an hour or so. She describes her husband as an introvert who does not express himself at all, and does not appreciate how hard she works. At the same time, we learn that he works two jobs - as a domestic servant nearby from 6.30 to 8.15 in the morning and again from 8-10.30 at night, and as a peon (orderly) at Indian Oil in between, leaving at 8.45 and getting home at 7 p.m.
Even the lives that are hard seem perfectly sustainable. All in all, it is difficult to tie these narratives to any strong sense of depletion, and especially to any idea of a tipping point, or an unsustainable burden of social reproductive work. The same is true of the following chapter, which represents commuting as ‘depletion on the move’, and is presented in the introduction as thinking through ‘how, together with unpaid social reproductive work, traveling to work is also unpaid labor that subsidizes the urban economy in neoliberal cities’ (17). So it may be. But the topic (travel to work) is considerably removed all the same from the central themes of the book, and the journeys to work are hardly exceptional. Notably, the four ‘harms’ and the three strategies to reverse depletion through social reproduction that have been identified as central to the analytical approach adopted are barely if at all touched upon in these two chapters.
In contrast, Chapters 5 (Depleting Futures - Children Who Care) and 6 (Postcards to the Future - Anticipatory Harms and Struggles against Extractivism) connect to issues of central relevance to the relationship between social reproduction and capitalist development. This is not primarily because of the specific method proposed - neither make use of the full FEOT or of shadowing, for example, nor is the extent of depletion measured - but because the ‘depletion’ that occurs is located at a precise point within the coordinates of contemporary global capitalism, and because continuity and connections between the ‘social reproductive’ and ‘capitalist’ spheres of production are present and directly addressed. Children who do social reproductive work, Rai remarks at the outset of Chapter Five, ‘contribute to the capitalist economy within which their households are embedded’, but are also ‘entangled with capitalist productive relations as both future labor and ongoing consumers’ (137). Those who provide care in the UK come disproportionately from poor and black, Asian or minority families, and onerous responsibilities, especially in the context of austerity and reduced public services, may deprive them of ‘childhood’, and lead to stigmatisation, bullying, poor health, and low educational aspirations and achievement. Conversely, though:
‘Researchers have identified not only the adverse effects of care labor on children but also the empowering aspects. They have argued that the provision of care by children is not necessarily an intrinsically harmful practice; rather it enables them to make a contribution to their households, and it can foster a sense of self-esteem. Further, that by participating in care work, children can come to understand the collective responsibility for care, pushing back against the individualized, neoliberal framings of society’ (144, references omitted).
The children in this small study (carried out by Rai and research assistant Anni Piiroinen) were accessed through a Coventry-based NGO, where ‘staff emphasized that there were a lot of children and families that were coping well with their caring responsibilities, even if these took up a lot of their time. On the other hand, there were some carers who were struggling, and experienced their caring responsibilities as overwhelming’ (155). Interview data from this small sample suggests that most were positive about their roles, and again throws up little evidence of a level of depletion that might in some sense be unsustainable.
The same is true, so far at least, of the struggle of the Xolobeni community against the establishment of a large open cast titanium mine on their ancestral land in the Eastern Cape. Here Rai introduces a twist on her four-point typology of harm: ‘I examine depletion in the future and argue that anticipating harm to the environment in which people live their everyday lives can be deeply depleting’ (170). At the same time, the rights of the community are protected by the South African constitution, are clearly recognized, and have been upheld in the end, so far, by South African courts and the government. This is in large part a result of local organization and struggle – and a successful struggle waged over decades can be empowering as much as depleting.
In summary, then, it is hard to find anyone in the three case studies who is so exhausted and mentally stressed by a relentless workload that their situation seems unsustainable. The one who comes nearest, in fact, is Deepa’s anonymous husband, whose working day is pretty unrelenting, with over four hours of waged domestic work bookending a principal job that has him out of the house from 8.45 a.m. until 7.30 p.m. More generally, there is no evidence of household indebtedness, chronic sickness or premature mortality – all possible markers of unsustainable depletion. At the same time, there are – literally – millions of women and men in India alone to whom the idea of depletion in this stronger sense might be applied, starting with Dalit and Adivasi migrant workers and their families (Shah and Lerche 2020). It is not, I am sure, that Rai is unaware of these and other cases. So how to explain this?
It took me some time to figure this out to my own satisfaction, but in the end the answer I came up with is simple. Rai has shifted the focus away from that of the earlier work, but has persisted with an earlier analytical framework that it is no longer fit for purpose. As is evident throughout, the focus here is ‘everyday’ depletion arising from the work of social reproduction (see especially 20-23). Such work could be so relentless that it becomes unsustainable, but generally speaking it is not, and Rai is no longer looking for thresholds and tipping points. Rather:
‘A strategic focus on time as commodity in the context of the everyday allows us to see how depletion through social reproductive labor is built into the everyday social economy of the individual, households, and communities and how gendered norms of care secure the discrepancies in different kinds of work’ (44, emphasis mine).
Second, the specific content of the four ‘gendered’ harms has been carried over without amendment, along with the three strategies for reversal. But none of the four harms apply well across the three cases, if at all, and as noted above they are not applied in the case of the New Delhi women. There is no adjustment to reflect the shift from gender to social reproduction with the introduction of (female and male) ‘children who care’; Rai has not thought to introduce something like ‘cognitive’ or ‘developmental’ harm to capture the impact on children of caring responsibilities, nor to promote the ‘anticipatory’ or indeed ‘planetary’ harm that is central to the Eastern Cape case to the analytical framework itself; nor has she considered the relevance of the categories of mitigation, replenishment and transformation to ‘everyday’ depletion, in comparison, say, with accommodation, adaptation, and resistance. As a consequence, when the conclusion returns to the original analytical framework, it appears to relate to a different book. Its primary focus is on crisis, despite the focus on the everyday as opposed to crisis in what has gone before; and the sections on mitigation, replenishment and transformation barely refer to the foregoing text.
At the same time, Rai’s dismissive attitude towards time use surveys and the like leads her to ignore a mass of data that could provide ‘evidence at scale’, and offer a broader picture of the balance between paid and unpaid work and the extent of social reproductive work between men and women and across social classes. The FEOT, as a labour- and time-intensive and therefore necessarily small-scale method for a single researcher or small research team, could have been complemented with data from the time use surveys that have proliferated in recent years (Campaña, Gimenez‐Nadal and Velilla 2023; Cornwell, Gershuny and Sullivan 2019; Craig and Sayer 2023; Garcia Roman and Pablo 2022; Gershuny and Sullivan 2019; Gimenez Nadal and Molina 2022; Mariani and Rosati 2023). Rai cites Gershuny and Sullivan (1998), but not Gershuny and Sullivan (2019), which not only offers a wealth of relevant material, but also notes that the 200-2001 ONS study of time use in the UK involved 11,854 time diaries, while the 2014-5 survey drew on a sample of 8,000 (Gershuny and Sullivan 2009:9). She seems unaware of the pioneering 2019 Indian Time Use Survey (ITUS 2019), covering 138,799 households with data on 447,250 individuals, which despite some limitations offers a mass of data on the same issues (Swaminathan 2020, Hirway 2022, Naidu and Rao 2024). Among other things, the zeal with which national and international authorities plan, fund and compile these resources shows that they are well aware of the amount of unpaid work done by women, and wish to get a clearer picture still – their purpose in doing so being, as it has been for more than four decades (Acharya 1982) to devise ways of shifting women from ‘unproductive’ unpaid work to ‘productive’ paid work.
Finally, it is next to impossible to assess the significance of such time use survey material, let alone of the handful of individual narratives on which Rai relies, without assessing them in relation to a macro-structural analysis of the global capitalist economy and its relationship with social reproductive work, and one that is sensitive to the significant structural changes that have taken place over recent decades. For example, the increasing entry of women into paid work has gone hand-in-hand with the widespread postponement of childbearing by more than a decade in comparison to previous generations. The connections between these trends can be related to the broader evolution of capitalism on a global scale, but they cannot be reduced to a single exclusive logic. Young women around the world may enter paid work for a variety of reasons, in quite different circumstances and social and political implications. At one extreme, they may do so reluctantly, under family pressure, handing the wage over to a father or mother as the case may be. At the other, it may be a free choice, associated with living independently and making a good income. In either case it will have consequences over time - increased authority within the family, perhaps, and greater freedom and autonomy. On this and a host of other issues, small-scale studies based on the FEOT and featuring diaries, shadowing and in-depth interviews, especially if followed up periodically, would be uniquely equipped to capture the specific logics at work at the micro-level, and act as a powerful antidote to supposing that there is only one. But the crucial current issues have first to be identified, and for this a macro-structural perspective alive to change over time is essential.
A final thought. Depletion, from day to day and over time, is a universal human condition. A level of depletion that endangers the health and well-being of individuals is of course to be deplored, and the ‘crisis of care’ impacts enormously both on those who require care and those who provide it. But as Martha Gimenez and I have recently argued (Cammack and Gimenez, forthcoming), capital can live with both happily enough, and indeed produces them in the ordinary course of its expansion, and this has enormous implications for ‘depletion’ itself, and for a critical political economy of the contemporary world.
References and further reading
Acharya, Meena. 1982. Time Use Data and the Living Standards Measurement Study, LSMS Working Paper No. 18, World Bank.
Cammack, Paul, and Martha Gimenez. 2024. ‘The Permanent Global Crisis of Working Class Social Reproduction: Ten Propositions’, Global Political Economy, Early View.
Campaña, Juan Carlos, Jose Ignacio Gimenez‐Nadal and Jorge Velilla. 2023. ‘Measuring Gender Gaps in Time Allocation in Europe, Social Indicators Research, 165, 519-33.
Cornwell, Benjamin, Jonathan Gershuny and Oriel Sullivan. 2019. ‘The social structure of time: Emerging Trends and New Directions’, Annual Review of Sociology, 45, 301-320.
Craig, Lyn, and Liana C. Sayer, ‘The role of time use studies in the recognition of unpaid work’, in Theun Peter van Tienoven, Joeri Minnen and Bram Spruyt, eds. 2023. Time Reveals Everything. Brussels: ASP, pp. 177-195.
Elson, Diane. 1998. ‘The Economic, the Political and the Domestic: Businesses, States and Households in the Organisation of Production’, New Political Economy, 3, 2, 189–208.
Elson, Diane (ed). 2000. The Progress of the World’s Women 2000. New York: UNIFEM.
Garcıa Roman, Joan, and Gracia Pablo. 2022. Gender differences in time use across age groups: A study of ten industrialized countries, 2005–2015. PLoS ONE 17(3): e0264411. https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0264411
Gershuny, Jonathan, Oriel Sullivan et al. 1998. ‘The Sociological Uses of Time-Use Diary Analysis, European Sociological Review 14, 1, 69–85.
Gershuny, Jonathan, and Oriel Sullivan, eds. 2019. What We really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research, London: Pelican.
Gimenez-Nadal, Jose Ignacio; Molina, José Alberto. 2022. ‘Time Use Surveys’, in K. F. Zimmermann, ed, Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics, Springer.
Hirway, Indira. 2022. The Indian time use survey: A critique. Economic and Political Weekly, 57(37), 46–51.
Hoskyns, Catherine, and Shirin M. Rai. 2007. Recasting the Global Political Economy: Counting Women's Unpaid Work, New Political Economy, 12:3, 297-317.
Kearney, Melissa S. and Philip B. Levine. 2022. ‘The Causes and Consequences of Declining US Fertility’, in Melissa S. Kearney and Amy Ganz, eds, Economic Policy in a More Uncertain World, Washington DC: Aspen Institute, pp. 74-101.
Mariani, Rama Dasi, and Furio Camillo Rosati. 2023. ‘Time use in macroeconomics: European integration and marketization of domestic work’, in Cesare Imbriani and Pasquale Scaramozzino, eds, Economic Policy Frameworks Revisited: A Restatement of the Evergreen Instruments, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 195-212.
Naidu, Sirisha, and Smriti Rao. 2024. ‘Revisiting class: A feminist political analysis of the Indian Time Use Survey’, Journal of Agrarian Change, Early View.
OECD. 2019. Enabling Women’s Economic Empowerment: New Approaches to Unpaid Care Work in Developing Countries. Paris: OECD.
Office for National Statistics, UK. 2023a. Conceptions in England and Wales, 2021, March 2023.
Office for National Statistics, UK. 2023b. Time Use in the UK: 23 September to 1 October 2023, November 2023.
Rai, Shirin M, Catherine Hoskyns and Dania Thomas. 2014. Depletion, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 16, 1, 86-105.
Rai, Shirin M, and Jacqui True. 2020. Feminist Everyday Observatory Tool, Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development.
Shah, Alpa, and Jens Lerche. 2020. Migration and the invisible economies of care: Production, social reproduction and seasonal migrant labour in India. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45, 4, 719–734.
Swaminathan, Madhura. 2020. Time-use survey report 2019: What do we learn about rural women? Review of Agrarian Studies, 10, 2, 93-98.
Mitigation, the least radical of the three strategies, took place when individuals ‘attempted to lessen the consequences of DSR by, for example, paying for help or sharing tasks across genders. Adopting mitigating strategies would include paying others to do tasks such as childcare and cleaning, using labour saving appliances and buying convenience foods’, 98-9). Replenishment (following Elson, 2000) took place where states or private bodies contributed to inflows that went some way to lessen the effects of DSR without necessarily recognizing it as harmful: ‘This would involve such state measures as tax breaks, state benefits and regulation of conditions of work, as well as the ready availability of health care and free schooling’ (99). Transformation, in contrast, implied structural change:
‘There are two aspects to transformation. The first is the restructuring of gendered social relations. This would mean, for example, both men and women being fully involved in the sharing of SR. This would transform not only the lives of millions of women who largely bear the burden of this work today, but would also mean the restructuring of wider social relations, as gender based inequalities outside the home are challenged to equalize social reproductive work. The second aspect of transformation is the issue of the recognition and valuation of SR and therefore of DSR’ (99).
Between Elson (1998) and Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas (2014), something significant was lost. Elson explored ‘feedbacks between the domestic, the political and the economic which are obscured by conventional political economy’ (190), setting ‘depletion’ in a holistic macro-level structural perspective. She placed particular emphasis on the role of the domestic sector in the production of a ‘productive and willing labour force’ (206), with all that implied in terms of physical and human capital, and argued that its capacity to make provision both for its own needs and those of the other sectors was compromised if unpaid and largely female labour was treated as a bottomless well, always available as a shock absorber or safety net of last resort. From this perspective, spending cuts and economic restructuring appeared to promote efficient growth, but were in fact likely to undermine the conditions for it in the longer term. The focus, in other words, was squarely on the role of the domestic sector in the social reproduction of a productive working class:
‘The production of labour capacities (physical, technical and social) depletes human energies, which need replenishing if the level of labour services is to be maintained. Replenishment requires inputs from the public and private sectors. The domestic sector cannot be seen as a bottomless well upon which the other sectors can draw: unless the inputs from the public and private sector are sufficiently nourishing, human capacities and provisioning values will be destroyed and they will drain away …’ (203).
Hoskyns and Rai (2007) and Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas (2014) took two successive steps away from this holistic focus centred on the dual role of the domestic sector. The 2007 article depicted a global economy with the private sector and wages at its centre (Figure 1 above), but moved away from the problematic of the role of social reproduction in the production of the working class, defining it more generally as ‘the glue that keeps households and society together and active’ (297). The 2014 article dropped Elson’s model of the global economy completely, arguing (wrongly) that she studied the consequences of neglect of SR ‘largely … in the context of economic crises’ (86), and went on from there to develop the concept of depletion in the manner summarised above.
Even so, the break with feminist political economy generally and the measurement of depletion in particular in Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring comes as a surprise. At the very start Rai unequivocally signals a shift from macro-structural political economy to a micro-level approach based upon individual stories:
‘Meera walks to work; she climbs over a fence to save 20 minutes because the gated community that she works in has shut all gates but one, which makes her journey longer. She does this because she needs to finish her work quickly in order to be able to collect her children from school and go home to do all the household chores before helping her children with their homework and then making dinner’ (1).
Call it what you will - an epistemological break, a methodological shift, or an embrace of the everyday - this opening move could not be more dramatic. The previous approach is immediately called into question, and the introduction and chapters 1 and 2 (1-76) set out the new in close dialogue with the old. Two chapters on eight women in New Delhi from varied class backgrounds (of whom Meera is one) are then followed by one on twenty children in Coventry (West Midlands, UK) who are carers for differently abled or sick parents and grandparents, and one on a community in Eastern Cape, South Africa, whose access to land and way of life are threatened by a proposed mining investment (77-194). A brief conclusion follows. Rai still argues that ‘our lives, and the lives of future generations, are dependent on the work we call social reproduction, the reproduction of life itself, which can be and is being eroded through depletion’ (3), but she does so by focusing on a very few individuals, in three situations. The book, she says, makes four arguments:
‘first, that the unequal system of social reproduction that leads to depletion harms those who care. This harm through depletion is multifaceted and affects everyone engaged in social reproduction, but unequally, and affects life that needs to be sustained and reproduced. Second, the strategies of reversing harm cannot be successful if society as a whole - states, markets, individuals, nonstate and collective actors - does not acknowledge in measurable ways this harm. Further, mitigatory strategies alone for reversing depletion can only be limited and unequal and indeed can intensify harm for some. State intervention in addressing the unequal distribution of social reproductive work is essential, if not sufficient, for replenishment as a strategy of reversal of harm. Third, a vision of a “good life” for all, rather than for only some, must include human as well as planetary care. Depletion of our environment is entangled with capitalism’s pursuit of cheap nature … and harms us and future generations … . Fourth, the recognition of depletion as harm must recognize the location and histories of inequalities that cast long shadows on the current care regime - race, gender, and class are vectors of this inequality’ (3-4).
The first part of the book reflects at length, then, on the agenda set out in Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas (2014), endorsing some aspects and sidelining others. The focus on individuals, households and communities, the four kinds of gendered harm arising from the failure to recognise and value women’s unpaid socially reproductive work, and the three strategies through which depletion might be reversed remain central (Figure 1.1, p. 31). But the comprehensive mapping of flows in the global political economy (Figure 1 above) has gone for good, and the attempt to measure DSR is addressed but set aside, with five issues that hamper measurement noted: the irregular and uneven nature of depletion; the problem of aggregating different forms of depletion at different levels in different contexts; the complications arising from the mix of finite and renewable resources in social reproductive work; the need for methodologies and units of measurement that are valid across different sites and North/South boundaries; and the presence of ‘gendered desirability biases’ in existing data sets (56-7):
‘These difficulties alerted me to the importance of critically assessing the potential of the model that we presented; in this book, I have not measured depletion using the model. Rather, I have disclosed its presence in different registers, argued for its recognition and compensation, and suggested ways of reversing it through individual strategies, collective struggles, and policy shifts’ (58).
Following this lengthy review Rai introduces the Feminist Everyday Observation Tool (FEOT):
‘In developing alternative strategies of researching depletion, I traded the scale of study for a focus on measuring time accurately, taking into account “social time” and reflexive time, location and context. I developed a method that also considered the time poverty of those engaged in both paid and unpaid work, as well as their educational levels. I worked with this methodology in 2016 (see Chapters 3 and 4) and used the experience to refine it further, together with my colleague Jacqui True; we called this method/ology the Feminist Everyday Observatory [now Observation] Tool (FEOT) (Rai and True 2020)’ (71-2).
This is ‘a narrative methodology that builds on both the epistemic histories of quantitative and qualitative research and one that pays attention to identities and subjectivities as well as structures of inequality and possibilities of change. While mapping time through a survey provides us with important insights, it does not allow us to explore the textures and rhythms of everyday life/work and their effects and how subjectivities are framed through this work, which in turn affect our sense of self’ (72):
‘FEOT can have only a small sample size because it is labor-intensive and therefore does not provide the evidence at scale, but it can deepen our understanding of the everyday rhythms of life, the nuanced relationship between paid and unpaid labor, the social and familial networks that embed those performing social reproduction and insights into the subjectivities of those doing this work. As such, it not only provides us with time-use data - qualitative, thick description, reflexive - but also allows us to ask different questions about social reproduction and its costs’ (73).
The FEOT has three steps (pre-questionnaire, observation, and post-observation narrative interview); the observer shadows the subject, fills out a time diary in 15-20 minute intervals for a 12-16 hour day, and notes such features as multitasking, and interaction with other household members. It is deployed in a ‘preliminary’ version in Chapters 3 and 4, in part in Chapter 5 (on the reasonable grounds that it would not have been appropriate to shadow child carers), and not at all in Chapter 6, which relies instead on a set of photographs and ‘postcards’ produced by Thom Pierce (Postcards from Xolobeni).
So, Chapter 3 reports on the application of a ‘prefigurative’ (16) and at that point un-named ‘early version’ of the FEOT, focused on ‘the everyday rhythms of doing social reproductive and paid labor by eight women, across time and space as well as class boundaries in one randomly chosen working/school day of their lives in New Delhi’ (78). The fieldwork was carried out by a research assistant, Pujya Ghosh, over four months in 2016, and involved a cross-class sample of eight women (two upper-middle, two middle, two lower-middle and two working class), all in heterosexual marriages, five in paid work, and six with children, two without.
This is our first encounter with empirical research material, and a puzzle immediately presents itself: on the crucial issue of depletion there is a glaring mismatch between the evidence from fieldwork and the conclusions Rai draws from it. These are key points from the summary that concludes the chapter:
‘Through time-use diaries, shadowing/observation, and interviews we find that depletion takes the form of physical exhaustion, mental stress, and social isolation in a context of patriarchal, gendered distribution of social reproductive work. … Depletion is a red thread that goes through this everyday landscape--tiredness, exhaustion, lack of recognition, the relentlessness of their work are all mentioned by each and every one of them in different contexts. … The women in these stories are … socially embedded but self-aware and engaged subjects who accept and carry the responsibilities of social reproduction with limited resources that they nurture, to stretch and to add to as they try to mitigate the depleting effects of social reproductive work’ (103, 105, 106, emphasis mine).
Really? Mamta, an ‘upper-class homemaker’ with two children and domestic help, reports having felt stressed in the past, and has joined an art class for relaxation. She likes watching Grey’s Anatomy, but laments that time is so short that “I can’t even get a pedicure” (94). Luckily, her husband ‘is a big support, and takes care of things when she is out with friends: “He never stops me … not that I take his permission [giggles]; I just tell him; but even then, he never says don’t go”’. She somehow finds the time to participate in car rallies, ‘and goes away for two days and her husband would work from home and let her enjoy” (101). And she confides that whenever she feels ‘overwhelmed’, ‘I say quietly [to her husband] that I will go either to my mom or mother-in-law for a night’ (103). Bindu, an ‘upper-class working woman’ with no children, reports that ‘I spend quite a bit of time on myself; I do yoga every morning for half an hour and spend two hours at my gym everyday and at the end of the day I watch TV; but mostly I am running around for others’ (94); She has domestic help at home, but says that her life would improve ‘outside if I had a driver; I drive myself. I feel I would then be able to use that time to make my phone calls [for work]’ (86). She grumbles that her husband often brings guests for meals without notice, and only thinks of her as a housewife (102).
Neela, a ‘middle-class homemaker’ with one child, rises at nine, and says: “Maximum two hours I spend on myself a day; I like doing crochet and reading books when I get time. Yoga, I won’t count because Ananya [her one-year-old daughter] is always around, and that is too distracting; anyway it doesn’t happen on a daily basis” (94). Her husband doesn’t help with the child, and for example won’t change her when she wets herself (102). In contrast, Sabina, a childless middle-class journalist, ‘reflects that she doesn’t do as many things for herself as she would like to. For instance, she would like to go for a walk, but that usually doesn’t happen because there is no time. She tries to do yoga three times a week. She reads on the metro, so that’s something she does for herself. On weekends, she gets a chance to meet her friends and unwind, but through the week there is no such option’ (95). Her husband shares the domestic work, cooking the dinner and helping to clearing up afterwards (101). She also has a maid, but reports that although she enjoys her work she gets so tired that she sometimes falls asleep on the metro (100).
Sangeeta, a ‘(? lower-)middle-class working woman’ with two children, is now a nursery teacher after ten years as a ‘homemaker’. She reports that her husband supports and appreciates her, and that he helps in the house, goes to the market, and does the ‘outside work’ (101). Suneeta, a lower-middle-class office worker with one child, ‘depends on her older sister and her friends for support: I share everything with didi [elder sister], which makes me feel relaxed. . . . [W]e don’t have the time to meet every weekend, even every other weekend, but now we have phones so we talk. . . . [S]ometimes I see her with my daughter, sometimes with my husband. . . . [W]e meet every other month. . . . I meet my friends in the mall . . . we have a WhatsApp group and we fix place and time to meet. . . . [When I go with my friends] I leave my daughter with my husband [giggles]” (93).
So far, then, the husbands are a mixed bunch, but there is little evidence either of patriarchy, or of depletion. The situation of the working class women is different. Meera, a domestic worker with two children (the one who hops over a fence to save time on her walk to work) used to work in Dubai, where ‘she really enjoyed herself’ (93). She finds it hard to come home to her own housework after her morning stint in the nearby gated community, but also reports that with her income and that of her husband, they make ends meet and she is able to save: “I only help; my husband earns. … [H]is salary comes on the seventh; if we need money on the first then my money helps; even without that, I can help the children I have opened accounts for five hundred rupees for the girl and the boy. … [T]his way we don’t have to ask others” (99). Deepa, a working-class ‘homemaker’ with two children who has never done paid work, also has a busy day. Without a car, she walks her two daughters to school and picks them up, at different times, and in all her day stretches from 5.30-45 to close on midnight. She does find time to walk on her own for recreation twice a day though, and spend an hour with her daughters in a park, and watches TV for an hour or so. She describes her husband as an introvert who does not express himself at all, and does not appreciate how hard she works. At the same time, we learn that he works two jobs - as a domestic servant nearby from 6.30 to 8.15 in the morning and again from 8-10.30 at night, and as a peon (orderly) at Indian Oil in between, leaving at 8.45 and getting home at 7 p.m.
Even the lives that are hard seem perfectly sustainable. All in all, it is difficult to tie these narratives to any strong sense of depletion, and especially to any idea of a tipping point, or an unsustainable burden of social reproductive work. The same is true of the following chapter, which represents commuting as ‘depletion on the move’, and is presented in the introduction as thinking through ‘how, together with unpaid social reproductive work, traveling to work is also unpaid labor that subsidizes the urban economy in neoliberal cities’ (17). So it may be. But the topic (travel to work) is considerably removed all the same from the central themes of the book, and the journeys to work are hardly exceptional. Notably, the four ‘harms’ and the three strategies to reverse depletion through social reproduction that have been identified as central to the analytical approach adopted are barely if at all touched upon in these two chapters.
In contrast, Chapters 5 (Depleting Futures - Children Who Care) and 6 (Postcards to the Future - Anticipatory Harms and Struggles against Extractivism) connect to issues of central relevance to the relationship between social reproduction and capitalist development. This is not primarily because of the specific method proposed - neither make use of the full FEOT or of shadowing, for example, nor is the extent of depletion measured - but because the ‘depletion’ that occurs is located at a precise point within the coordinates of contemporary global capitalism, and because continuity and connections between the ‘social reproductive’ and ‘capitalist’ spheres of production are present and directly addressed. Children who do social reproductive work, Rai remarks at the outset of Chapter Five, ‘contribute to the capitalist economy within which their households are embedded’, but are also ‘entangled with capitalist productive relations as both future labor and ongoing consumers’ (137). Those who provide care in the UK come disproportionately from poor and black, Asian or minority families, and onerous responsibilities, especially in the context of austerity and reduced public services, may deprive them of ‘childhood’, and lead to stigmatisation, bullying, poor health, and low educational aspirations and achievement. Conversely, though:
‘Researchers have identified not only the adverse effects of care labor on children but also the empowering aspects. They have argued that the provision of care by children is not necessarily an intrinsically harmful practice; rather it enables them to make a contribution to their households, and it can foster a sense of self-esteem. Further, that by participating in care work, children can come to understand the collective responsibility for care, pushing back against the individualized, neoliberal framings of society’ (144, references omitted).
The children in this small study (carried out by Rai and research assistant Anni Piiroinen) were accessed through a Coventry-based NGO, where ‘staff emphasized that there were a lot of children and families that were coping well with their caring responsibilities, even if these took up a lot of their time. On the other hand, there were some carers who were struggling, and experienced their caring responsibilities as overwhelming’ (155). Interview data from this small sample suggests that most were positive about their roles, and again throws up little evidence of a level of depletion that might in some sense be unsustainable.
The same is true, so far at least, of the struggle of the Xolobeni community against the establishment of a large open cast titanium mine on their ancestral land in the Eastern Cape. Here Rai introduces a twist on her four-point typology of harm: ‘I examine depletion in the future and argue that anticipating harm to the environment in which people live their everyday lives can be deeply depleting’ (170). At the same time, the rights of the community are protected by the South African constitution, are clearly recognized, and have been upheld in the end, so far, by South African courts and the government. This is in large part a result of local organization and struggle – and a successful struggle waged over decades can be empowering as much as depleting.
In summary, then, it is hard to find anyone in the three case studies who is so exhausted and mentally stressed by a relentless workload that their situation seems unsustainable. The one who comes nearest, in fact, is Deepa’s anonymous husband, whose working day is pretty unrelenting, with over four hours of waged domestic work bookending a principal job that has him out of the house from 8.45 a.m. until 7.30 p.m. More generally, there is no evidence of household indebtedness, chronic sickness or premature mortality – all possible markers of unsustainable depletion. At the same time, there are – literally – millions of women and men in India alone to whom the idea of depletion in this stronger sense might be applied, starting with Dalit and Adivasi migrant workers and their families (Shah and Lerche 2020). It is not, I am sure, that Rai is unaware of these and other cases. So how to explain this?
It took me some time to figure this out to my own satisfaction, but in the end the answer I came up with is simple. Rai has shifted the focus away from that of the earlier work, but has persisted with an earlier analytical framework that it is no longer fit for purpose. As is evident throughout, the focus here is ‘everyday’ depletion arising from the work of social reproduction (see especially 20-23). Such work could be so relentless that it becomes unsustainable, but generally speaking it is not, and Rai is no longer looking for thresholds and tipping points. Rather:
‘A strategic focus on time as commodity in the context of the everyday allows us to see how depletion through social reproductive labor is built into the everyday social economy of the individual, households, and communities and how gendered norms of care secure the discrepancies in different kinds of work’ (44, emphasis mine).
Second, the specific content of the four ‘gendered’ harms has been carried over without amendment, along with the three strategies for reversal. But none of the four harms apply well across the three cases, if at all, and as noted above they are not applied in the case of the New Delhi women. There is no adjustment to reflect the shift from gender to social reproduction with the introduction of (female and male) ‘children who care’; Rai has not thought to introduce something like ‘cognitive’ or ‘developmental’ harm to capture the impact on children of caring responsibilities, nor to promote the ‘anticipatory’ or indeed ‘planetary’ harm that is central to the Eastern Cape case to the analytical framework itself; nor has she considered the relevance of the categories of mitigation, replenishment and transformation to ‘everyday’ depletion, in comparison, say, with accommodation, adaptation, and resistance. As a consequence, when the conclusion returns to the original analytical framework, it appears to relate to a different book. Its primary focus is on crisis, despite the focus on the everyday as opposed to crisis in what has gone before; and the sections on mitigation, replenishment and transformation barely refer to the foregoing text.
At the same time, Rai’s dismissive attitude towards time use surveys and the like leads her to ignore a mass of data that could provide ‘evidence at scale’, and offer a broader picture of the balance between paid and unpaid work and the extent of social reproductive work between men and women and across social classes. The FEOT, as a labour- and time-intensive and therefore necessarily small-scale method for a single researcher or small research team, could have been complemented with data from the time use surveys that have proliferated in recent years (Campaña, Gimenez‐Nadal and Velilla 2023; Cornwell, Gershuny and Sullivan 2019; Craig and Sayer 2023; Garcia Roman and Pablo 2022; Gershuny and Sullivan 2019; Gimenez Nadal and Molina 2022; Mariani and Rosati 2023). Rai cites Gershuny and Sullivan (1998), but not Gershuny and Sullivan (2019), which not only offers a wealth of relevant material, but also notes that the 200-2001 ONS study of time use in the UK involved 11,854 time diaries, while the 2014-5 survey drew on a sample of 8,000 (Gershuny and Sullivan 2009:9). She seems unaware of the pioneering 2019 Indian Time Use Survey (ITUS 2019), covering 138,799 households with data on 447,250 individuals, which despite some limitations offers a mass of data on the same issues (Swaminathan 2020, Hirway 2022, Naidu and Rao 2024). Among other things, the zeal with which national and international authorities plan, fund and compile these resources shows that they are well aware of the amount of unpaid work done by women, and wish to get a clearer picture still – their purpose in doing so being, as it has been for more than four decades (Acharya 1982) to devise ways of shifting women from ‘unproductive’ unpaid work to ‘productive’ paid work.
Finally, it is next to impossible to assess the significance of such time use survey material, let alone of the handful of individual narratives on which Rai relies, without assessing them in relation to a macro-structural analysis of the global capitalist economy and its relationship with social reproductive work, and one that is sensitive to the significant structural changes that have taken place over recent decades. For example, the increasing entry of women into paid work has gone hand-in-hand with the widespread postponement of childbearing by more than a decade in comparison to previous generations. The connections between these trends can be related to the broader evolution of capitalism on a global scale, but they cannot be reduced to a single exclusive logic. Young women around the world may enter paid work for a variety of reasons, in quite different circumstances and social and political implications. At one extreme, they may do so reluctantly, under family pressure, handing the wage over to a father or mother as the case may be. At the other, it may be a free choice, associated with living independently and making a good income. In either case it will have consequences over time - increased authority within the family, perhaps, and greater freedom and autonomy. On this and a host of other issues, small-scale studies based on the FEOT and featuring diaries, shadowing and in-depth interviews, especially if followed up periodically, would be uniquely equipped to capture the specific logics at work at the micro-level, and act as a powerful antidote to supposing that there is only one. But the crucial current issues have first to be identified, and for this a macro-structural perspective alive to change over time is essential.
A final thought. Depletion, from day to day and over time, is a universal human condition. A level of depletion that endangers the health and well-being of individuals is of course to be deplored, and the ‘crisis of care’ impacts enormously both on those who require care and those who provide it. But as Martha Gimenez and I have recently argued (Cammack and Gimenez, forthcoming), capital can live with both happily enough, and indeed produces them in the ordinary course of its expansion, and this has enormous implications for ‘depletion’ itself, and for a critical political economy of the contemporary world.
References and further reading
Acharya, Meena. 1982. Time Use Data and the Living Standards Measurement Study, LSMS Working Paper No. 18, World Bank.
Cammack, Paul, and Martha Gimenez. 2024. ‘The Permanent Global Crisis of Working Class Social Reproduction: Ten Propositions’, Global Political Economy, Early View.
Campaña, Juan Carlos, Jose Ignacio Gimenez‐Nadal and Jorge Velilla. 2023. ‘Measuring Gender Gaps in Time Allocation in Europe, Social Indicators Research, 165, 519-33.
Cornwell, Benjamin, Jonathan Gershuny and Oriel Sullivan. 2019. ‘The social structure of time: Emerging Trends and New Directions’, Annual Review of Sociology, 45, 301-320.
Craig, Lyn, and Liana C. Sayer, ‘The role of time use studies in the recognition of unpaid work’, in Theun Peter van Tienoven, Joeri Minnen and Bram Spruyt, eds. 2023. Time Reveals Everything. Brussels: ASP, pp. 177-195.
Elson, Diane. 1998. ‘The Economic, the Political and the Domestic: Businesses, States and Households in the Organisation of Production’, New Political Economy, 3, 2, 189–208.
Elson, Diane (ed). 2000. The Progress of the World’s Women 2000. New York: UNIFEM.
Garcıa Roman, Joan, and Gracia Pablo. 2022. Gender differences in time use across age groups: A study of ten industrialized countries, 2005–2015. PLoS ONE 17(3): e0264411. https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0264411
Gershuny, Jonathan, Oriel Sullivan et al. 1998. ‘The Sociological Uses of Time-Use Diary Analysis, European Sociological Review 14, 1, 69–85.
Gershuny, Jonathan, and Oriel Sullivan, eds. 2019. What We really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research, London: Pelican.
Gimenez-Nadal, Jose Ignacio; Molina, José Alberto. 2022. ‘Time Use Surveys’, in K. F. Zimmermann, ed, Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics, Springer.
Hirway, Indira. 2022. The Indian time use survey: A critique. Economic and Political Weekly, 57(37), 46–51.
Hoskyns, Catherine, and Shirin M. Rai. 2007. Recasting the Global Political Economy: Counting Women's Unpaid Work, New Political Economy, 12:3, 297-317.
Kearney, Melissa S. and Philip B. Levine. 2022. ‘The Causes and Consequences of Declining US Fertility’, in Melissa S. Kearney and Amy Ganz, eds, Economic Policy in a More Uncertain World, Washington DC: Aspen Institute, pp. 74-101.
Mariani, Rama Dasi, and Furio Camillo Rosati. 2023. ‘Time use in macroeconomics: European integration and marketization of domestic work’, in Cesare Imbriani and Pasquale Scaramozzino, eds, Economic Policy Frameworks Revisited: A Restatement of the Evergreen Instruments, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 195-212.
Naidu, Sirisha, and Smriti Rao. 2024. ‘Revisiting class: A feminist political analysis of the Indian Time Use Survey’, Journal of Agrarian Change, Early View.
OECD. 2019. Enabling Women’s Economic Empowerment: New Approaches to Unpaid Care Work in Developing Countries. Paris: OECD.
Office for National Statistics, UK. 2023a. Conceptions in England and Wales, 2021, March 2023.
Office for National Statistics, UK. 2023b. Time Use in the UK: 23 September to 1 October 2023, November 2023.
Rai, Shirin M, Catherine Hoskyns and Dania Thomas. 2014. Depletion, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 16, 1, 86-105.
Rai, Shirin M, and Jacqui True. 2020. Feminist Everyday Observatory Tool, Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development.
Shah, Alpa, and Jens Lerche. 2020. Migration and the invisible economies of care: Production, social reproduction and seasonal migrant labour in India. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45, 4, 719–734.
Swaminathan, Madhura. 2020. Time-use survey report 2019: What do we learn about rural women? Review of Agrarian Studies, 10, 2, 93-98.