The invisible work behind the word ‘inactive’

What does an inactive woman do all day?

The question sounds almost absurd once you ask it plainly. It also exposes a habit in the way institutions describe the labour market. Someone who is not in paid employment, and who does not meet the criteria for being counted as unemployed, may be classified as economically inactive. The classification has a purpose. Yet the word can travel far beyond the statistical table where it belongs.

On a campaign poster, in a news headline or in a conversation about public support, inactive can start sounding like a judgment of character. It can suggest an absence of effort, ambition or contribution.

That is where communication has work to do.

In our UNFPA engagement on women’s economic participation, a central question was what this label leaves out. The campaign concerned women, particularly mothers with preschool-aged children, who faced barriers to entering or returning to paid work. Its published material included educational content, a film and 25 participant cards carrying the women’s own words.

The tension was not between people who work and people who do not. It was between what a labour-market category measures and everything it cannot describe.

A classification is not a biography

Labour-market statistics need clear definitions. Without them, comparisons across places and time become unreliable. The distinction between being employed, unemployed and outside the labour force is important for understanding the economy and designing policy.

Under international statistical standards, unemployed is not simply another word for a person without a paid job. It also involves criteria about seeking work and availability during a reference period. Someone who does not meet those criteria may be classified as outside the labour force.

The International Labour Organization explicitly favours the neutral term outside the labour force over older expressions such as economically inactive population. One reason is that people outside the labour force may still perform forms of work that sustain households and contribute to society. The category describes a relationship to paid employment; it is not a judgment about someone’s principal activity or social role.

That is the distinction worth preserving.

The problem is not that statistics should stop classifying. It is that communication can mistake the classification for the person. A term designed for a dataset becomes a label attached to a photograph of a mother, a parent, a carer or a woman looking for a different opportunity.

The data may be accurate while the story is incomplete.

Work does not disappear when no one pays for it

Consider a morning organised around preparing breakfast, getting a child dressed, taking them to preschool, arranging care when that plan falls through, managing a household and finding a few uninterrupted hours to look for opportunities.

Those tasks are not a fictional description of one UNFPA participant. They are ordinary examples of unpaid responsibilities that can shape access to paid employment.

They also show why the phrase not working can be misleading. Some tasks may be recognised as employment when someone is paid to perform them, yet disappear from popular descriptions of economic activity when done without pay within a family.

The International Labour Organization estimated that in 2023, approximately 708 million women globally were outside the labour force because of unpaid care responsibilities. It is a worldwide estimate, not a figure for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it does not mean every person outside the labour force has the same experience.

Still, it establishes that care is not a minor detail to append to a discussion about employment. For many women, it is central to the conditions under which paid work becomes possible.

There is a risk here, too. In trying to recognise unpaid care, communicators can accidentally romanticise an unequal burden. Celebrating a woman for doing everything does not answer whether she has time, support, income, childcare or meaningful choices.

Recognition matters. So do the conditions that make choices real.

The label hides several different barriers

Imagine two women described by the same employment category.

One has qualifications that local employers do not recognise. Another has experience but cannot reliably arrange childcare. Another is considering returning after years away from formal employment and encounters assumptions about her age or commitment. Another wants paid work but has no feasible transport or flexible schedule.

These examples illustrate different barriers; they are not individual histories attributed to campaign participants.

Treating all these situations as evidence of a lack of initiative would lead to poor communication and poor decisions. A motivational slogan might encourage someone, but it cannot resolve an unavailable childcare place, a hiring bias or a qualification mismatch.

That is why a responsible campaign has to distinguish personal confidence from structural constraints. Both may matter. Neither should be used to conceal the other.

Our UNFPA project was connected to a 2023 programme that provided work experience to 29 mothers, with childcare arranged for their children during the programme period. The public programme information and campaign material make that connection clear. They do not establish what happened to every participant’s employment afterwards, and we should not invent those outcomes.

What the programme demonstrates at the level of its design is a practical recognition: participation becomes more feasible when barriers are addressed alongside the opportunity itself.

For communicators, that is a far more useful proposition than telling people to try harder.

Let people complicate the headline

The 2023 campaign published 25 cards featuring participant statements, identified by first names. The material does something that institutional writing often struggles to do: it places individual voices beside a general category.

Rather than reproduce those statements selectively to manufacture a tidy argument, the case study gives readers access to the original cards and their wording. The range matters. A group of people who may share a programme experience need not share one attitude, one aspiration or one account of what confidence means.

A communicator’s job is not to make every participant sound like the same ideal success story.

The familiar narrative arc is tempting: an individual begins uncertain, receives help, becomes transformed and confirms the programme’s value. Such arcs may be emotionally satisfying. They are also liable to flatten complicated experiences into a sequence that serves the institution better than the people involved.

Sometimes a participant expresses excitement about something new. Sometimes the value lies in having an opportunity to try, in feeling taken seriously or in naming an obstacle that persists. We should not turn every statement into evidence of a measurable economic outcome.

A good editorial question is: Would this person recognise themselves in the short version of their story?

Another is: Are we allowing an ordinary, unfinished experience to remain unfinished?

Those tests can be more useful than trying to make every quote inspirational.

Framing is more than choosing nicer words

It would be easy to solve the problem superficially by replacing inactive with a more flattering label. But language works alongside images, sequence, context and the actions a campaign recommends.

If the copy says women are full of potential while the images portray them only as passive recipients of help, the two are telling different stories. If the campaign celebrates motherhood while describing it as the sole identity a woman should occupy, it has simply exchanged one limiting label for another.

An important distinction emerged while revisiting the campaign’s presentation for the SO.. website. We could strike through inactive, because it is the reductive label being questioned. But striking through mother or housewife carries a different implication. Those descriptions may be meaningful parts of someone’s life. The aim is not to erase them; it is to refuse the idea that they exhaust what a person is or can become.

This is a small design decision with a large editorial consequence.

Creative treatments always make arguments, even when there is no explanatory paragraph beside them. A strike-through says reject this. A reveal says there is more. A photograph beside a statistic says interpret this person through that number. An oversized headline may make a technical label feel definitive even when the surrounding copy adds nuance.

We should review all of those decisions as carefully as the text itself.

Five questions before publishing a story about opportunity

When a campaign concerns employment, care or social inclusion, we find it useful to work through five questions. This is an editorial checklist, not a framework claimed from the UNFPA programme.

1. What does the key term actually measure? If the term is statistical, define it. Don’t treat the category as a moral diagnosis. If public-facing language can be clearer without sacrificing accuracy, use it.

2. What barrier are we naming? Distinguish access to training, access to childcare, recruitment decisions, qualifications, income and confidence. A campaign that collapses them into one problem tends to offer one-dimensional answers.

3. Who has agency in the story? Participants should not appear only as evidence for an institution’s benevolence. Give their words and choices real space, with consent and appropriate context.

4. What is the institution actually offering? Be precise about eligibility, programme duration, support and the difference between training, work experience and a job. An encouraging message should not become a misleading promise.

5. What can we prove happened? A published video, a completed programme and reported campaign distribution are different kinds of evidence. They cannot substitute for a verified longer-term employment outcome.

The checklist is deliberately simple. The complexity lies in applying it honestly when deadlines, approvals and the demand for a clear headline are pulling in other directions.

Distribution can amplify framing errors too

Digital channels make it possible to reach people who might not follow an institution directly. They can also spread an incomplete phrase far beyond the context that originally explained it.

The UNFPA campaign included participant cards, educational posts, stories and a film, distributed through social channels and paid promotion. Different formats offered different kinds of depth. A brief visual might challenge a label; a longer film could explain the programme; educational content could situate the issue in a broader social context.

That variety is useful only when the parts remain consistent. If the first piece implies that anyone can enter paid work through determination alone, a careful explanation buried three clicks later will not fully correct the impression.

Campaign performance numbers tell us something about how widely content travelled. They do not establish that the audience changed its attitudes towards unpaid care or that an individual’s prospects improved because of exposure to a post.

We have written elsewhere about why reach is not the same as people or impact. Here, the parallel lesson is that an accurate number cannot rescue an inaccurate frame.

Name the work. Make room for the life.

There is no single sentence that can represent every woman outside the paid labour force. Nor should there be.

The more useful task is to explain what the available category means, recognise what lies beyond it, show where real barriers exist and allow people to speak without being reduced to a programme’s ideal outcome.

For the UNFPA campaign, the word inactive gave us a starting point. The participants and their contributions made the limits of that word visible.

The goal wasn’t to declare that everyone is economically active under every definition. It was to ask a better question: What does this description help us count, and what does it prevent us from seeing?

When language can hold both answers, communication becomes more accurate and more humane.