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Comment by trianglem | Hacker News Reader

That’s because you are not counting housekeeping and child rearing as essential labor which is inaccurate.

Labor participation would be 99% in all countries. What’s your point?

The 20% to 60% is meant to demonstrate female inequality in India, because most of them are working at home for zero pay and low social status. Whereas in more developed countries, women get paid to work in industries.

I think the point the parent is trying to make is that saying that "participation of women in the workplace" isn't a directly-correlated metric for the "how happy / empowered / established / productive are women in this society" metric that we all care about improving.

To put it another way, if we just take the former metric as the gold measure it is better to be payed to care for someone else's children than to not be payed to care for your own.

Is there any particular reason why you are assuming that housekeeping and child rearing should be the exclusive responsibility of women?

I'm struggling to see any honest point in this comment.

I said saying only 20% of women are involved in labor in India is incorrect. That number is much much higher if you take those into account.

The statistic is saying that 20% of women in India participate in the workforce as it is defined.

Are you trying to say that the 60% of Chinese women includes women who are homemakers and aren't in the workforce as it is defined?

You’re wrong. Every country would have 99% labor participation rate if you count those. It’s not meaningful

The fact is only 20% of women are not getting paid for their labor. It’s a sign of huge lack of development progress

I think OP was making a statement about how things are rather than how they should be.

I agree with you that this shouldn’t be the case, but right now it absolutely is the case in India.

OP's comment doesn't add anything of value in that case. In 99% of cultures out there, traditional roles imply that the women is a homemaker.

Nobody reasonable assumes that women not counted in labor participation statistics are partying on the moon :-)

I.e.: we already knew what he's saying.

A childcare facility shows up in labor statistics, why shouldn’t a mother’s labor?

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