Nepal, Oct. 15 -- Nepal's official statistics say that most women do not work. The 2017-18 Labour Force Survey reports that 26.3 percent of women are in the labour force, whereas the same figure for men is 53.8 percent. The count is accurate by its own rules, but the rules are the problem. Because the survey counts only work done for pay or profit. It leaves out cooking, cleaning, fetching water, raising children, growing food for the family, and caring for older relatives. The gap measures what the rules exclude, not what women do. This blind spot is expensive, and the bill has two parts. The first is the work itself, which has a value that the official numbers cannot capture, and the second is the generation of daughters schooled for le...