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Different Perspectives on Time Use: Nature, Norms, Crisis and Policy

Paper Session

Saturday, Jan. 5, 2019 12:30 PM - 2:15 PM

Hyatt Regency Atlanta, Hanover A
Hosted By: International Association for Feminist Economics
  • Chair: Diana Strassmann, Rice University

Market and Non-Market Division of Labor: Gender, Race and Class Dimension in Post Great Recession Canada

Ana Androsik
,
New School for Social Research

Abstract

I aim to test how the Great Recession impacted workers groups in Canada stratified by gender,
ethnicity, immigrant status, income level, and age. Did the crises pose an extra burden to the time allocation at work and at home of more various groups in a social hierarchy?
to which extent household work time in Canada had changed? How did the status change after the Great Recession of 2008 in terms of hours worked on the market and in the household?

Precipitation and Women’s/Children’s Domestic Work: Evidence from Ugandan Panel Time-Use for Fetching Water

Akito Kamei
,
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

In a society without infrastructure, climate conditions affect daily activities. This paper doc- uments how one activity, fetching water, changes depending on the precipitation. Using satellite- collected, daily precipitation data, this study finds that a decrease in rainfall increases the time spent fetching water, especially for children and women. Analysis by gender revealed that, while girls spend more time fetching water, the change in time fetching water in response to rainfall is larger for boys. The impact is the largest for adult women. A decrease in daily rainfall from the 75th percentile to the 25th percentile increases the labor hours of women by 0.54 hours per week (13.3% from the average). Further analysis shows that severe weather (a dry spell lasting more than 20 days) increases the distance between the main water source and the dwellings. The effect of the severe weather on the choice of the water source was not observed in this study.

Going Beyond the Surface: Public Infrastructure Investment and Intra-Household Hierarchy within Females

Fareena Noor Malhi
,
American University

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of the public infrastructure investment on time allocation patterns, focusing on the heterogeneity within females based on their intra-household gender roles in the context of rural Pakistan. It analyzes the association between the public infrastructure investment (access to on-site safe drinking water and natural gas for cooking) and the time allocation in labor market work (paid and subsistence), household and care work, as well as in learning, leisure, and self-maintenance using Pakistan Time Use Data 2007 with seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) approach. The full sample of females is divided into sub-samples by household type, nuclear and multi-generational households and intra-household gender roles are captured by relationship to the household head (spouse, daughter/grand-daughter, mother, daughter-in-law). Exploiting the time use data of sub-categories of household work, the analysis is extended to assess the correlation between ownership of the labor-saving household appliances (washing machine, refrigerator, gas stove) on time spent in laundry and food preparation. The ownership of appliances is instrumented—to address the endogeneity problem—with a self-excluding community level average of labor-saving appliance ownership. The results indicate significant heterogeneity among females explained by their gender roles. In addition, access to natural gas lowers the burden for daughters and pulls them towards education whereas wife and DIL have increase unpaid work. In contradiction, access to water reallocates the time saved from unpaid work towards subsistence work with a negative effect on learning.


JEL Codes: D13, J16, J22
JEL Classifications
  • J3 - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs
  • F6 - Economic Impacts of Globalization