Time Poverty: The quiet thief of women’s potential

A few weeks back, I wrote to you about agency—the ability to make choices, act on those choices, believe your decisions matter, and influence the world around you. Yet, for many women and girls who grow up conforming to deeply entrenched expectations of “how girls
should behave,” agency is constrained early.

What we rarely acknowledge is that these expectations quietly steal their time. Time is a resource we are all born with. But when society has already mapped out a woman’s life, and consequently her time around stifling roles, she ends up spending her days in
predetermined ways that do not align with her potential. When this happens, attainment becomes impossible. This brings me to a serious and often overlooked issue: time poverty.

Time poverty occurs when the most basic unit of productivity, time, is gradually eroded because individuals lack control over how it is used. For many women, this erosion is not accidental; it is created by social expectations that apportion their time toward unpaid, undervalued, and often invisible labour, leaving little room for personal growth, rest, or economic advancement.

Why is Time Poverty Harmful

Disproportionate allocation of domestic responsibilities often leads to neglect of self, health, and opportunity. I often tell the story of my neighbour who was perpetually managing the home front
while partnered with a husband who was chronically unemployed and frequently intoxicated. Not only did she carry the weight of household labour, her income became the family’s lifeline. Her
time was consumed by survival, leaving little space for rest or aspiration. She passed away mid-pregnancy from exhaustion.

Time poverty is evident in many women putting their lives on pause while dreams are deferred. I remember a couple where the husband pursued his career across the world, often asking, “Who
will be with the children?” The implication was clear. Years passed. Only when the children were
grown did the woman begin the slow process of nurturing her own aspirations at great cost.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of time poverty is how it affects effectiveness. Many women
spend significant portions of their lives on repetitive domestic tasks and unpaid labour. It is worth asking: how can these tasks be done more effectively; could they be supported by systems, tools, or shared responsibility? More importantly, how do the activities consuming your
time contribute to your growth and long-term potential, or quietly retard it?

Time Use Starts with Women and Girls’ Sense of Autonomy

If time poverty is one of the quietest ways agency is stripped away, then reclaiming agency must begin with how women understand and exercise control over their time. For women, time use
must be understood as something that flows directly from their choices. That means choices originating from women themselves include how they spend their time and what they define as productivity. Too often, productivity for women is measured against externally imposed standards, rather than outcomes that align with her potential and aspirations.

Agency, after all, is the ability to orchestrate events to arrive at outcomes you deem meaningful.
These events unfold in time. How you spend your time, therefore, is not incidental; it is foundational. The question every woman must ask herself is this: Am I consciously directing my
time toward outcomes that enable me to attain my potential, or am I merely complying with expectations that keep me occupied but unfulfilled?

Reframing Time Use to Prevent Neglect, Loss of Potential, and Redundancy

However, personal agency alone cannot resolve time poverty. Society’s institutions, norms, and
gatekeepers must also confront how women’s time is structured, consumed, and devalued.

While changing deeply ingrained gender roles will take time, a shift in perspective is an urgent starting point.

The gatekeepers of women’s lives—families, workplaces, policymakers, and cultural institutions—must begin to see time use as a determinant of wellbeing and productivity. When systems are designed in ways that assume women will absorb the bulk of care and domestic labour, neglect and redundancy become inevitable outcomes, not personal failures.

Reframing time use means designing homes, workplaces, and policies that acknowledge care as shared work, support women’s continuity in professional life, and protect their right to rest, growth, and economic participation. Without this shift, society will continue to lose talent quietly,
not through lack of competence, but through exhaustion and neglect.

Time Poverty Is Not a Personal Failure

Time poverty is not a personal failure; it is a design flaw. It begins with the refusal to recognise that unpaid labour sustains households, economies, and careers, yet remains disproportionately
assigned to women.

It is already troubling that opportunities for women are often designed around restrictive gender roles in order to be “realistic.” It is even more troubling when, despite this accommodation,
women still cannot make the time required to grow.

I witnessed this firsthand while supporting a gender-transformative project in East Africa aimed
at enhancing women’s productivity within agricultural valuechains. Women were engaged in poultry farming because it could be done within the home, supposedly allowing them to balance caregiving and income generation. Yet despite already being economically active, these women
still had to complete domestic chores before tending to their farms. Time was lost daily.

Businesses did not scale. Income growth remained slow, often limited to supplemental earnings
rather than sustainable livelihoods.
We measure our existence by time—by age—yet consistently underestimate the impact of how time is spent. When time is misallocated for too long, the cost is not just delayed progress; it is
lost potential that cannot be recovered.

What emerged clearly from stakeholder interviews during the East African project was the necessity of involving husbands in the solution because, without redistributing care and
domestic responsibility, productivity gains would be short-lived. Women were positioned as entrepreneurs in theory, but time-poor in practice.

Why the Urgency Matters
The urgency of addressing time poverty lies in its cumulative effect. Time use compounds. What women are constrained to do repeatedly over the years shapes not only their outcomes, but their relevance, resilience, and ability to adapt. When the greater part of a woman’s productive years is consumed by tasks that do not build skills, expand capacity, or create economic
mobility, vulnerability becomes inevitable.

Over time, knowledge becomes obsolete, skills fail to evolve, and productivity declines. Not because of incapacity, but because there was no room to grow. Work that neither stretches expertise nor generates scalable value eventually becomes replaceable by systems, technology, or younger labour. In such circumstances, survival becomes uncertain, particularly in later life
when adaptability matters most.

There is also a physical reckoning. Bodies subjected to prolonged stress, repetitive labour, and chronic neglect eventually give way. Time poverty does not simply drain ambition; it erodes
health. What society often interprets as endurance is, in reality, sustained exposure to strain without protection or renewal.

This is why time poverty cannot be treated as a secondary concern or deferred problem. When misallocated for too long, time does not just delay progress, it forecloses it. Potential lost to time poverty is rarely recovered.