Education and the allocation of time of married women in Iran

In the past two decades Iranian women have become much better educated and reduced their fertility, by more than two-thirds. However, their participation in market work has not increased appreciably. We turn to time-use data to better understand the relationship between women’s education and their time use, specially time allocated to children and market work. We employ new data from a time-use survey of urban households in 2009 and show that education affects the time use of married women in predictable ways, increasing their time in market work and child education and reducing their time in housework. These results indicate that in Iran productivity of women’s education is realized in the market as well as at home, in particular in investment in children. The fact that more educated women devote more time to market work and child education, the two activities that contribute to economic growth, challenges the notion prevalent in the conservative policy circles in Iran that public resources allocated to women’s education are somehow wasted.