Gendered Dimensions of Unpaid Activities: An Empirical Insight into Rural Bangladesh Households

Abstract

Women in Bangladesh are generally perceived as caregivers, often confined within the households to perform various activities, whereas men are perceived as the providers. These complex gendered roles intersect with multiple factors such as household structure, marital status, religion, cultural beliefs, economic shocks, and livelihood opportunities. This study used the feminist political ecology framework to contextualize and analyze time allocated toward unpaid works, culturally accepted as female/gendered activities, and the nuanced power dynamics between men and women within the rural households of Bangladesh. We used the household survey data collected from the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey of 2015 to create a multiple linear regression model that helps understand the impacts of economic, cultural, and environmental shocks on the total time allocated toward unpaid activities by women within the household. Results suggest women who experienced climate-change shocks such as crop losses due to disasters and non-climatic shocks such as dowry tend to allocate more time toward unpaid tasks. In contrast, women who own their businesses tend to give less time toward unpaid tasks. This study provides guidelines for necessary gender-sensitive national policies to address the United Nation’s goal of gender equity and sustainable development.

Urban growth and quality of life: inter-district and intra-district analysis of housing in NCT-Delhi, 2001–2011–2020

“…Also, it is a known fact that women in general and female child, particularly in India and generally in all developing countries of the world face enormously greater shares of unpaid household responsibilities that have high opportunity costs as they are unable to attend schools and build their lives and careers to same levels as that of the men in their respective societies (Sharma, 2020(Sharma, , 2021. This eventually puts the women and girls at higher risks of poverty and cyclic economic deprivation, thence posing risks toward attaining gender equity (Islam & Sharma, 2021;Sharma, 2020Sharma, , 2021. Achieving overall well-being and socio-economic equality for gender is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.…”

Gendered dimensions of educational premium disadvantage in earnings in USA, 2019

“…Simultaneously, other research has also indicated that despite adequate educational attainment and technical skills, women across the globe have continued to face occupational discrimination across industries (HTTP1, HTTP2). Even though women have economically been part and parcel of their households and family incomes since ages, largely contributing through their undervalued and unrecognized unpaid works (Islam & Sharma, 2021 , 2022 ; Kantor, 2009 ), it is no surprise that their gains in earnings have had to tread through far larger burdens of discriminations and biases in a society that still favors and pays males over females, even within feminine industries (Coe et al, 2012 ; Sharma, 2021a , 2021b ).…”

Multiple Dimensions of Gender (Dis)Parity: A County-Scale Analysis of Occupational Attainment in the USA, 2019

“…Indeed, research has also indicated that despite adequate educational attainment and technical skills, women across the globe have continued to face occupational discrimination across industries [15,16]. Women have economically always contributed to the larger society through paid and unpaid work [17]. Now, even though women have started reaping the benefits of their improved skills and educational attainments by increasing their participation in male-dominated industries, more progress is required to attain gender equity and parity across non-traditional industries so that economic parity can be achieved [2].…”

“…Gender differences across occupations and their restricted participation as paid labor in industries has drawn international attention from economists and social scientists in recent times [17][18][19]. Women continue to be severely underrepresented at almost every level in corporate America, even though their educational attainments have increased significantly over three decades, and despite women's improved shares in post-high school and collegiate-level education over those of men, their participation in some of the traditionally masculine occupations and industries have not changed proportionately [20,21].…”

“…Research suggests that women's under/over-representation in specific industries occurs also due to the formal and informal nature of work and their activity spaces, which assigns differential monetary values to activities based on their activity spaces-public versus private [1,[15][16][17]20,21]. This occurs because most activities performed by women are completed inside domestic spaces, i.e., in private spaces inside the boundaries of their households, which makes them invisible and undervalued [1,17,[20][21][22][23]. As such, women's activities performed inside the boundaries of their homes largely become undervalued, resonating with the dark side of reproductive and caring activities by women.…”