The nobody at home

A visitor comes to the door. The call goes out. Is there anyone here? Is anyone at home? From within, a woman’s voice answers. No. Nobody.

But she is there. Her daughters are there. The house is full of living, breathing human beings. Yet her answer is immediate and certain. Nobody.

This is not a lie. It is a reflex. It is a truth forged in the daily fire of being unseen. In that moment, she translates the question through a brutal cultural dictionary. “Anyone” does not mean her. “Anybody” is not her body. A person is a man. She is a woman. Therefore, to the question “is there a person here,” the answer is a factual no. She has internalised her own erasure. She has learnt to delete herself from the census of her own home.

This moment at the doorway is not an anomaly. It is a fact. It is the entire story of policy and value crammed into a single exchange. It is the quiet, daily violence of being a ghost in your own nation.

What does work mean?

When the surveys come, the same logic applies. The officer with the clipboard asks the woman what she does. She says, I do not work. She has risen at five. She has fetched water. She has cooked, cleaned, fed children, washed clothes, managed a household, cared for the sick, negotiated for market goods, and planned the next day. She has not stopped moving for fourteen hours. Yet her answer is firm. “I do not work.”

This is not a misunderstanding. It is a perfect understanding of the rules. Work is what happens outside the home for a wage. Work is what appears on a ledger. Work is what a man does. Her labour, though it sustains the actual economy of life, is not classified as work. It is a non-activity. It is a hobby of necessity. It is breathing. She has inhaled an economic principle so completely that she uses it to describe her own existence. I do not work.

Who does the nation count?

The national statistics are clear. They measure the productive economy. They count the maize grown for sale, not the flour cooked for the family. They count the wage paid in a factory, not the childcare that enables the factory worker to leave home. The Gross Domestic Product is a map that deliberately leaves out the most fertile territory. The unpaid care economy—the engine of every single productive worker—is a blank space. It is the dark matter of our national economics: it holds everything together, but we have agreed not to see it.

This is policy. This is not an oversight. It is a choice. A choice to define contribution so narrowly that it systematically excludes the primary contribution of half the population. When a woman says she does not work, she is quoting national accounting standards. She is citing policy. Her voice is the living, breathing embodiment of a spreadsheet that deleted her.

When does invisibility become a belief?

The most dangerous moment is not when a system ignores you. It is when you start to believe the system is correct. The internalisation is the victory. The woman at the door does not say “no men.” She says “nobody.” She has accepted the premise. She has agreed that her presence is not personhood. Her labour is not work. This belief is the glue that holds the entire structure upright. No oppressive system needs to police every door. It needs only to teach the people inside to police themselves.

What does it do to a girl, hearing her mother announce their collective non-existence to the world? What curriculum does that moment teach? She learns that to be a woman is to be a background noise. She learns that her future labour will be a statistical ghost. She learns that the most fundamental question—“is anybody there”—does not concern her. This is how a culture replicates its blindness. Not through force, but through grammar.

What is the cost of the missing number?

We can measure the cost. We can count the hours. Studies by the United Nations and others quantify it: women and girls undertake more than three-quarters of all unpaid care work globally. In some countries, this constitutes the equivalent of years of additional full-time employment per woman, per year. This is not free labour. It has an astronomical opportunity cost. It is time not spent in education, in rest, in civic participation, in wage-earning employment, in political life. The entire structure of our formal economy is subsidised by this invisible, uncounted labour.

But the deeper cost is to the concept of justice itself. A society that will not count its foundational labour is a society that lies to itself about its own foundations. It builds its palace on a hidden, exploited aquifer and then claims the water appears by magic. When the well runs dry, it will express confusion. We built everything so well, it will say. We followed the plans.

How do we rewrite the question?

The change does not start with a new policy paper. It starts at the door. It starts with the question. We must challenge the grammar of existence.

The next visitor must ask, differently. “I am here to speak with the people of the household. May I come in?” The survey must ask, differently. “What work did you do today, in the home or outside it? Tell me about your labour.” The national accounts must ask, differently. “What is the total productive activity required to sustain a human life, and how do we value it?”

But first, the woman herself must ask, differently. She must hear the echo of her own “nobody” and recognise it as a foreign language she was forced to learn. She must relearn her own grammar. I am here. This is work. I am somebody.

Who will build the new ledger?

The path forward is concrete. It requires a dual assault on the internal and the external.

We must create visible, alternative ledgers. Community groups can document the hours, the tasks, the economic value of unpaid care. They can present this shadow budget to local councils. Children can be taught to count their mother’s labour in school maths problems. Artists can make it visible. The “invisible” work must be made so visible it becomes impossible to ignore.

Simultaneously, policy must be dragged into the light of this reality. Legislation must mandate time-use surveys that inform national accounting. Public services must be designed to reduce, not exploit, the unpaid care burden. Infrastructure—water, energy, transport—must be judged by how it frees women’s time. The goal is not to monetise a mother’s love. The goal is to ensure her labour is seen, valued, and supported as the essential public good it is.

Where do we start tomorrow?

Start by listening. When a woman says “I do not work,” do not correct her. Ask her. “Tell me about your day from the moment you woke up.” Listen as she lists the sheer volume of managed complexity. Then reflect it back to her. “That is not nothing. That is the work of sustaining life.”

Start by counting. In your own home, count it. Acknowledge it aloud.

Start by refusing the old question at the door. “Yes,” we must practice saying. “We are here. The women are here. We are somebody.”

The house is not empty. It is full of the people who hold the world together with their invisible hands. The first step is to see them. The second is to force the ledger to recognise their weight. The final step is for them to write their own names, in ink that cannot be erased, under the column marked “essential.”