The workforce or labour force is the concept referring to the pool of human beings either in employment or in unemployment. It is generally used to describe those workings for a single company or industry, but can also apply to a geographic region like a city, state, or country. Within a company, its expediency can be labelled as its "Workforce in Place". The workforce of a country includes both the employed & the unemployed labour force.
Paid and unpaid work are also closely related with formal and informal labour. Some informal make-up is unpaid, or paid under the table. Unpaid gain can be work that is done at domestic to sustain a family, like child care work, or actual habitual daily labour that is not monetarily rewarded, like works the fields. Unpaid workers have zero earnings, and although their work is valuable, this is the tough to estimate its true value. The controversial debate still stands. Men and women tend to work in different areas of the economy, regardless of if their work is paid or unpaid. Women focus on the service sector, while men focus on the industrial sector.
Women commonly work fewer hours in income generating jobs than men do. Often this is the housework that is unpaid. Worldwide, women and girls are responsible for a great amount of household work.
The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World, published in 2008, stated that in Madagascar, women spend 20 hours per week on housework, while men spend only two. In Mexico, women spend 33 hours and men spend 5 hours. In Mongolia the housework hours amount to 27 and 12 for women and men respectively. In Spain, women spend 26 hours on housework and men spend 4 hours. Only in the Netherlands do men spend 10% more time than women do on activities within the home or for the household.
The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World also stated that in development countries, women and girls spend a significant amount of time fetching water for the week, while men do not. For example, in Malawi women spend 6.3 hours per week fetching water, while men spend 43 minutes. Girls in Malawi spend 3.3 hours per week fetching water, and boys spend 1.1 hours. Even whether women and men both spend time on household work and other unpaid activities, this work is also gendered.
In the United Kingdom in 2014, two-thirds of workers on long-term sick leave were women, despite women only constituting half of the workforce, even after excluding maternity leave.