Women’s labor in South Africa – Time spent doing simultaneous paid and unpaid work

Empirical literature finds gender and presence of children as key determinants of unpaid work time. There is also extensive research on women’s role in small-scale agriculture and women’s disproportional representation in informal employment in developing countries. However, there has been no work to empirically link a woman’s time spent simultaneously doing paid and unpaid work with her type of employment. The availability of rich time use data from South Africa yields an opportunity to explore this critical question with empirical rigor. Results show that small-scale agriculture and informal employment are associated with women doing more paid and unpaid work simultaneously implying a positive non-pecuniary benefit of certain types of employment related to women’s need to navigate strict time constraints and limited choices.