Measuring Women's Work in Developing Countries

While an extensive literature documents the need for better measures of women's work, few attempts have been made to construct suitable work typologies that could be applied throughout the developing world. The author argues that in addition to the descriptive utility of more‐comprehensive measures of women's work, important analytical gains are to be made by applying better measures of work to a variety of research questions. Conventional labor force participation measures ignore an often substantial proportion of women's total productive activity, resulting in a limited understanding of the many processes that affect and are affected by women's work. The proposition is supported by examining an issue drawn from social demography—the relationship between women's work and decisionmaking relative to fertility in contemporary Egypt.