ABSTRACT
Nearly 300 researchers from Asian and other countries participated in an Asian Regional Conference on ‘Women and the Household’ in New Delhi, India in the winter of 1985. The significance of the conference was in its wide coverage of issues and participation from the developing world. One of the conference's sub-themes on women and home-based production generated a consensus highly relevant to the content of this chapter, i.e. the invisibility of home-based work which is tied to a general neglect of the household economy and a narrow definition of work which precludes its inclusion in official statistics. A precondition for correction of the problem, the participants concluded, is to make this work visible through research and publications in order to help mobilise social and legislative action.
