Nepal’s official statistics say that most women do not work. The 2017-18 Labour Force Survey reports that 26.3 percent of women are in the labour force, whereas the same figure for men is 53.8 percent. The count is accurate by its own rules, but the rules are the problem. Because the survey counts only work done for pay or profit. It leaves out cooking, cleaning, fetching water, raising children, growing food for the family, and caring for older relatives. The gap measures what the rules exclude, not what women do. This blind spot is expensive, and the bill has two parts. The first is the work itself, which has a value that the official numbers cannot capture, and the second is the generation of daughters schooled for less.
Economists no longer treat home as the economic outsider. The International Labour Organisation has priced unpaid care work at the minimum wage across 64 countries. It comes to 9 percent of world output, and women work three-quarters of the hours. In Asia and the Pacific, women do four times as much unpaid care as men. Men there do the least of any region. Work that is not counted is still work. Someone gives up the hours, and the economy gives up whatever those hours could have earned.
Nepal fits this regional pattern closely. A 2022 time-use study covers 3,500 households in Bagmati and Madhesh provinces. It finds that women spend close to six hours a day on domestic and care work, while men in the same survey spend 2.25 hours. The World Bank’s jobs diagnostic for Nepal reaches the same conclusion from the other side. Most Nepali women work, but most of it is unpaid. The wage jobs added over the past decade went mainly to men. The female workforce looks small only because the counting rules hide what women do.
Put a market price on that work, and the scale becomes clear. Nepal’s minimum wage since July 2025 is Rs101 an hour. Six hours a day of cooking, cleaning, water, childcare and elder care comes to about 2,190 hours a year. At Rs101 an hour, that is roughly Rs221,000 a year for one woman. That figure is a floor, for two reasons. It uses the lowest legal wage, and a hired cook, nanny and cleaner together cost more than that in Kathmandu. It also counts only visible tasks because no survey records the settling of family disputes or the holding together of a household under stress. Value one hour a day of that at the part-time rate of Rs107, and it adds about Rs39,000. The total is close to Rs260,000 a year, or about $1,900. Nepal’s GDP per person in 2024 was $1,447. The unpaid work of one woman at home is therefore worth more than the recorded output of the average Nepali. That value appears nowhere, neither in GDP nor on a payslip. Often, her own family does not see it either.
The same blind spot shapes how families spend on school. Families invest where they expect a return, and a daughter’s return is hidden from them twice. Her work at home is uncounted, and her paid work, when it exists, pays less. In his 2018 research, Shaleen Khanal used three rounds of the Nepal Living Standards Survey and found that parents spend more on sons’ schooling than on daughters’, in villages and cities alike. Sons are also more likely to be placed in private schools, which parents say openly when asked. When fees stretch, the son attends a private school and the daughter a government one. The 2021 census records the consequences. Literacy is 83.6 percent among men and 69.4 percent among women.
What has this discrimination cost Nepal? No study prices son preference in Nepali schooling on its own. What follows is my own arithmetic, with the assumptions stated. The World Bank’s Gender Employment Gap Index gives a simple way to estimate it. The long-run gain in GDP per person from closing a gender employment gap roughly equals the size of that gap. The gap is the male-female difference divided by the sum of the two rates. On Nepal’s participation rates, that gap is about 34 percent. The cross-country average is about 20 percent. Nepal’s GDP in 2024 was$42.9 billion. Applied to that, the two gaps imply a loss of output of roughly $9-15 billion per year. Schooling does not explain all of that because care burdens, social norms and job locations matter too. Suppose only one third of the gap traces back to how girls were educated. The cost is then about $3-5 billion per year at today’s economic size. Those girls left school about 20 years ago, when the economy was smaller. Even so, the loss summed over those years runs into tens of billions of dollars. That is a lost generation: women schooled for fewer years, and now paid less or not at all.
Two objections to this are predictable. The first is that the 2017-18 survey is old, but little has changed since. The World Bank’s figure for 2023 puts female participation at 28.7 percent, while that of men is 53.9 percent. The second is that Nepal now enrols as many girls as boys in primary school, and that is real progress. But equal enrolment is not equal spending. It also says nothing about who is told to stop studying when a brother needs the fees.
Three fixes follow from the evidence above. First, the National Statistics Office should publish an annual estimate of the value of unpaid work alongside GDP. Then the figure can enter the budget debate. Second, the government should publish private school enrolment by sex every year, so the bias stays visible. Third, scholarship support should go to girls in secondary school because the World Bank finds that most of the earnings gain from girls’ schooling comes from completing secondary school. Set against $3-5 billion in lost output annually, these measures are cheap. In terms of arithmetic, it is the cheapest growth Nepal can buy.