The role of economic invisibility in development: veiling women's work in rural Pakistan

The thesis in this article is that both women's work and its invisibility are essential to development, and at two levels: to the economy of rural households and to the wider development process. For rural households, the case of Pakistan suggests that the veils that conceal women's work shield a portion of household production from the risks and extractions inherent in their involvement with development. This shielded production depends on off-farm natural resources of which the use is also veiled. For States and other development interests, the author suggests that women's work constitutes a subsidy which is intentionally invisible. The subsidy of women's labour is linked to a forest-to-farm subsidy. Women's invisible work, in other words, is not invisible because it is not seen, but because the process of economic development—for both rural households and States and other development actors—requires that it be hidden.