Improving the Measurement of Women’s Work: The Contribution of Demographic Surveys in Francophone Africa

Anne-Emmanuèle Calvès, Université de Montréal
Agnes A. Adjamagbo, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)

Since the 1970s the measurement and recognition of women’s work have been a matter of academic interest, as well as feminist advocacy. The interrelationships between women’s work and demographic processes, especially fertility decisions, have also attracted the attention of demographers for some time. However, despite long-standing efforts to capture all aspects of women’s work, large scale demographic surveys conducted in the global South, including in Africa, still fail to approach work as a gendered concept and continue to make much of women’s work invisible. Measurement of unpaid care and household work is particularly scare. In such context, the paper first retraces the long history of the global efforts of feminist scholars and activists to enhance the measurement of women’s work; and second it illustrates how recent data collections in francophone West Africa, have attempted to fill some of the persisting gaps in data on women’s activity.