IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2106.15376.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

What Explains Gender Gap in Unpaid Household and Care Work in India?

Author

Listed:
  • Athary Janiso

    (BITS-PILANI, Hyderabad Campus)

  • Prakash Kumar Shukla

    (BITS-PILANI, Hyderabad Campus)

  • Bheemeshwar Reddy A

    (BITS-PILANI, Hyderabad Campus)

Abstract

Due to the unavailability of nationally representative data on time use, a systematic analysis of the gender gap in unpaid household and care work has not been undertaken in the context of India. The present paper, using the recent Time Use Survey (2019) data, examines the socioeconomic and demographic factors associated with variation in time spent on unpaid household and care work among men and women. It analyses how much of the gender gap in the time allocated to unpaid work can be explained by differences in these factors. The findings show that women spend much higher time compared to men in unpaid household and care work. The decomposition results reveal that differences in socioeconomic and demographic factors between men and women do not explain most of the gender gap in unpaid household work. Our results indicate that unobserved gender norms and practices most crucially govern the allocation of unpaid work within Indian households.

Suggested Citation

  • Athary Janiso & Prakash Kumar Shukla & Bheemeshwar Reddy A, 2021. "What Explains Gender Gap in Unpaid Household and Care Work in India?," Papers 2106.15376, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2021.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2106.15376
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.15376
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jonathan Gershuny & John Robinson, 1988. "Historical changes in the household division of labor," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 25(4), pages 537-552, November.
    2. Tanja Fendel, 2021. "The Effect of Housework on Wages: A Study of Migrants and Native-Born Individuals in Germany," Journal of Family and Economic Issues, Springer, vol. 42(3), pages 473-488, September.
    3. Indira Hirway, 2015. "Unpaid Work and the Economy: Linkages and Their Implications," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_838, Levy Economics Institute.
    4. Marjorie B. McElroy, 1990. "The Empirical Content of Nash-Bargained Household Behavior," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 25(4), pages 559-583.
    5. Menta, Giorgia & Lepinteur, Anthony, 2021. "Boys don’t cry (or do the dishes): Family size and the housework gender gap," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 186(C), pages 164-188.
    6. Vinoj Abraham, 2008. "Employment growth in rural India: Distress driven?," Centre for Development Studies, Trivendrum Working Papers 404, Centre for Development Studies, Trivendrum, India.
    7. Farzana Afridi & Taryn Dinkelman & Kanika Mahajan, 2018. "Why are fewer married women joining the work force in rural India? A decomposition analysis over two decades," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 31(3), pages 783-818, July.
    8. Ross A. Williams, 1999. "Wage Effects on the Volume of Unpaid Work in Nuclear Australian Households," Australian Economic Papers, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(2), pages 91-105, June.
    9. Xiao-yuan Dong & Xinli An, 2015. "Gender Patterns and Value of Unpaid Care Work: Findings From China's First Large-Scale Time Use Survey," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 61(3), pages 540-560, September.
    10. Afridi, Farzana & Dinkelman, Taryn & Mahajan, Kanika, 2016. "Why Are Fewer Married Women Joining the Work Force in India? A Decomposition Analysis over Two Decades," IZA Discussion Papers 9722, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    11. Daniel Kahneman & Alan B. Krueger, 2006. "Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 20(1), pages 3-24, Winter.
    12. Oaxaca, Ronald, 1973. "Male-Female Wage Differentials in Urban Labor Markets," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 14(3), pages 693-709, October.
    13. Joni Hersch & Leslie S. Stratton, 2002. "Housework and Wages," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 37(1), pages 217-229.
    14. Evrim Altintas & Oriel Sullivan, 2016. "Fifty years of change updated: Cross-national gender convergence in housework," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 35(16), pages 455-470.
    15. Meurs, Mieke & Slavchevska, Vanya, 2014. "Doing it all: Women’s employment and reproductive work in Tajikistan," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(3), pages 786-803.
    16. Jonathan Gershuny & Oriel Sullivan, 2014. "Household structure and housework: assessing the contributions of all household members, with a focus on children and youths," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 12(1), pages 7-27, March.
    17. Sanjiv Gupta & Michael Ash, 2008. "Whose money, whose time? A nonparametric approach to modeling time spent on housework in the United States," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(1), pages 93-120.
    18. Ronald L. Oaxaca & Michael R. Ransom, 1999. "Identification in Detailed Wage Decompositions," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 81(1), pages 154-157, February.
    19. Boris Hirsch & Thorsten Konietzko, 2013. "The effect of housework on wages in Germany: no impact at all [Der Einfluss von Hausarbeit auf die Löhne in Deutschland]," Journal for Labour Market Research, Springer;Institute for Employment Research/ Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), vol. 46(2), pages 103-118, August.
    20. de Bruin, Anne & Liu, Na, 2020. "The urbanization-household gender inequality nexus: Evidence from time allocation in China," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 60(C).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Athary Janiso & Prakash Kumar Shukla & Bheemeshwar Reddy A, 2024. "What explains the gender gap in unpaid housework and care work in India?," Development Policy Review, Overseas Development Institute, vol. 42(1), January.
    2. José M. Casado-Díaz & Raquel Simón-Albert & Hipólito Simón, 2023. "Gender Differences in Commuting: New Evidence from Spain," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 169(3), pages 907-941, October.
    3. Chenghua Guan & Ling Zuo, 2021. "Sustainability of Regional Factors on the Gendered Division of Housework in China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(19), pages 1-16, September.
    4. de la Vega, Noa, 2022. "The differential effect of childbirth on men's and women's careers," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    5. Ilhom Abdulloev & Ira N Gang & Myeong-Su Yun, 2014. "Migration, Education and the Gender Gap in Labour Force Participation," The European Journal of Development Research, Palgrave Macmillan;European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), vol. 26(4), pages 509-526, September.
    6. Sami Napari, 2008. "The Early‐career Gender Wage Gap among University Graduates in the Finnish Private Sector," LABOUR, CEIS, vol. 22(4), pages 697-733, December.
    7. Thorsten Konietzko, 2015. "Self-Employed Individuals, Time Use, and Earnings," Journal of Family and Economic Issues, Springer, vol. 36(1), pages 64-83, March.
    8. BALDWIN Marjorie L. & CHOE Chung, 2010. "New Estimates of Disability-Related Wage Discrimination with Controls for Job Demands," LISER Working Paper Series 2010-14, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER).
    9. Azam Mehtabul & Han Luyi, 2020. "Accounting for Differences in Female Labor Force Participation between China and India," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 20(2), pages 1-17, April.
    10. Vassilis Monastiriotis & Angelo Martelli, 2021. "Crisis, Adjustment and Resilience in the Greek Labor Market: An Unemployment Decomposition Approach," International Regional Science Review, , vol. 44(1), pages 85-112, January.
    11. Brandon Vick, 2017. "Measuring links between labor monopsony and the gender pay gap in Brazil," IZA Journal of Migration and Development, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 7(1), pages 1-28, December.
    12. Luis Ayala & Javier Mart n-Rom n & Juan Vicente, 2023. "What Contributes to Rising Inequality in Large Cities?," LIS Working papers 850, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg.
    13. Ferreira, Francisco H. G. & Firpo, Sergio & Messina, Julián, 2017. "Ageing Poorly? Accounting for the Decline in Earnings Inequality in Brazil, 1995-2012," IZA Discussion Papers 10656, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    14. Oscar Molina Tejerina & Luis Castro Peñarrieta, 2020. "Unexplained Wage Gaps in the Tradable and Nontradable Sectors: Cross-Sectional Evidence by Gender in Bolivia," Investigación & Desarrollo 0120, Universidad Privada Boliviana, revised Nov 2020.
    15. Pushpendra Singh & Falguni Pattanaik, 2020. "Unfolding unpaid domestic work in India: women’s constraints, choices, and career," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 6(1), pages 1-13, December.
    16. Bryan, Mark & Bryce, Andrew & Rice, Nigel & Roberts, Jennifer & Sechel, Cristina, 2022. "Exploring mental health disability gaps in the labour market: the UK experience during COVID-19," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    17. Ferreira, Francisco H. G. & Firpo, Sergio & Messina, Julián, 2017. "Ageing Poorly? Accounting for the Decline in Earnings Inequality in Brazil, 1995-2012," IZA Discussion Papers 10656, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
    18. Kritkorn Nawakitphaitoon & Xuan Chen & Yuhao Ge, 2016. "State and Non-state Earnings Differentials over Time in China’s Urban Labor Market: Evidence from the Urban Household Survey (1994–2007)," Journal of Labor Research, Springer, vol. 37(3), pages 287-316, September.
    19. Dina Shatnawi & Ronald Oaxaca & Michael Ransom, 2014. "Movin’ on up: Hierarchical occupational segmentation and gender wage gaps," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 12(3), pages 315-338, September.
    20. Christina Boll & Malte Jahn & Andreas Lagemann, 2017. "The gender lifetime earnings gap—exploring gendered pay from the life course perspective," Journal of Income Distribution, Ad libros publications inc., vol. 25(1), pages 1-53, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2106.15376. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.