| Summary: | Discussion of the importance of unpaid domestic labor, as well as its effects on participation in extra-domestic labor, particularly the way it discourages women from undertaking activities aimed at the market, dates back several decades. It was not until the last decade, however, that systematic efforts began to be made in the international context to make domestic labor visible and measure it in official statistics. The borders between the domestic and the extra-domestic have not been static, which calls for a continuous review of the concepts used together with the search for methodologies to enable one to assess the economic value of domestic labor. This article begins with a conceptual review and ends with the presentation of some of the results obtained for Mexico in the 2002 National Survey on Time Use. The survey reveals men and women’s varying degrees of participation in the two types of work, highlighting the differences in the amount of time spent on domestic labor. The article ends with a measurement exercise to show that domestic labor is by no means a marginal contribution, since its value exceeds that of several economic sectors.
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