Women build, nurture, care. It’s never ‘just’ a hobby

The question feels especially urgent given the Supreme Court of India’s recent judgment describing homemakers as “nation builders”, and assigning a notional value of Rs 30,000 per month to unpaid domestic labour while calculating compensation in a motor accident case. The Court put a figure to what millions of women have always known: That running a household, raising children, and holding a family together has economic and social value, even with no salary attached. The judgment has opened a national conversation that resurfaces every few years and then quietly fades, about what counts as work and who gets to decide.

For generations, women have been told that their work at home matters, while being treated as though it does not count. We celebrate professionals, executives, and entrepreneurs, yet often describe homemakers as “not working”. A woman may spend decades managing budgets, caring for children and ageing parents and in-laws, providing emotional support, solving crises, and creating the stability that lets everyone else pursue their ambitions. Yet she is often met with the phrase: “Just a housewife”.

That single word “just” reveals the problem.

Stepping away from paid work to care for family is not an absence of work. It is a transfer of work. The labour remains. The pay-check disappears, and with it, somehow the recognition.

I experienced this directly.

For more than two decades, academia was not merely my profession, it was part of my identity. Then family responsibilities demanded my attention, and pulled me away. I did not stop contributing. I simply began contributing in ways that were harder to measure and exchanged paid work for unpaid work. The years that followed were filled with caregiving, problem-solving, emotional labour, logistics, and support. Alongside, there was continuous work of a voluntary nature supporting people in need of emotional anchor. They were demanding and productive years but left no line on a resume, or a figure that a salary slip could capture.

That is where the Court’s judgment and this kind of experience meet. Women are first undervalued for the unpaid years they give to family and society. Then if they try to return to paid work, especially later in life, they are undervalued again, this time for having the grit to start something new at an age when they are expected to be winding down. The same “just” that shrinks a homemaker’s labour also shrinks a 50-something woman’s profession into something done “for pocket money”.

Both judgements rest on a narrow idea of what counts as real work, and a narrow idea of who is allowed to do it, and when. Caregiving years build judgement, patience, crisis management, and emotional intelligence, not gaps to apologise for. A woman who returns to paid work after this is not starting from nothing. She is starting from years of practice, carrying capabilities that no internship or entry-level role could have taught her.

The Court’s ruling matters because it forces a legal reckoning with contribution. But the social reckoning still has to follow it into far more ordinary places.

An employer who treats unpaid years as a liability, and age as a ceiling, isn’t just being unfair to one woman. They are discarding a deep, underused reserve of skill that the country can’t really afford to waste, under conditions no training programme could simulate.

The years women spend caring for others are not empty, lost, or irrelevant. They are years of labour, growth, and quiet expertise. Recognising that has to mean more than a single court judgment, however welcome. It has to change how résumés are read, how interview panels are trained, and how a society finally decides that beginning again, at any age, for any reason, is never just about pocket money.

The writer is a life coach