Caught in a time warp: evidence from time use of Indian women

Purpose - The study aims to examine the patterns of time allocated to paid employment activities by women in India as well as change in time allocating pattern of women over the period 1998 to 2019. In doing so, it attempts to highlight gender-asymmetry of time use and heterogeneity in time use of women residing in urban and rural areas as well as variations in time use by marital status, motherhood and age. Design/methodology/approach - Using unit-level data from two available Time Use Surveys (TUS) namely the Pilot Survey TUS 1998 and first nationally representative TUS 2019, the authors use Tobit model to estimate determinants of women’s time in employment. To explain the change in time spent on paid work by women over the two decades, the authors use counterfactual quantile regression decomposition. Findings - The gender asymmetry in time allocation is stark, with women spending one fifth time compared to men paid employment activities. Over the two decades of interest, women’s time spent on employment activities in a day has reduced by half from around 4 h to 2 h, largely driven by rural women’s time. Regression results suggest the emergence of a “U-shaped” relationship between time spent on paid work and education of women. The counterfactual decomposition results suggest that women are spending lesser time on employment activities in 2019 than in 1998 across the time distribution. Originality/value - This paper contributes to a novel understanding of time use by women in a developing country by analysing the changes in time use over two decades as well as distributional sensitivity to observed characteristics. The study informs about the intensive margins of female employment by incorporating dynamics of socio-economic development. Peer review - The peer review history for this article is available at:https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-03-2022-0164.