Marriage, Labor Market Segregation, and the Persistence of Gendered Time Inequality: Evidence from Thailand

In this study, we examine the persistence of gendered inequality in unpaid domestic work among employed individuals during Thailand’s 2004–2014 structural transformation, a period shaped by major reforms in education and healthcare. We provide new evidence from middle-income Southeast Asia, where gender norms remain strong but empirical evidence is still limited, especially for marriage and labor market segregation. Methodologically, we use repeated cross-sectional data from Thailand’s Time Use Survey (N = 57,555) and pooled OLS models with survey-year fixed effects under alternative sample definitions. Our results reveal a large and persistent gender gap across all specifications. Marriage is associated with substantially higher amounts of unpaid domestic work for women, while labor market segregation displays gendered dynamics: employment in female-dominated industries and female household headship are associated with lower domestic work burdens, whereas employment in male-dominated industries shows no robust association with women’s unpaid domestic work time. Although the raw gender gap narrowed over the ten-year period, the adjusted gap widened after accounting for individual, employment, and household characteristics, suggesting that compositional improvements among women masked a deepening relative domestic burden. These findings suggest that economic development alone may not automatically reduce gender inequality within households, with important implications for labor markets and social policies in developing economies.