Gendered Time Use and its Heterogeneities:The Role of Region, Religion and Caste

Abstract

Is female labour force participation a good proxy for gendered time use? How do geography and the social institutions of caste and religion interact with the gendered distributionof time within Indian households? In this study, we use gender distance metrics, inspired by distance measures between vectors, to measure and document the extent to which time allocation within households is gendered. Importantly, we find that the relationship between gender distance and labour force participation is not monotonic and the linear relationship between the two is not statistically strong. Furthermore, we show that the relationship of caste, religion and region with gendered time use metrics is distinct from their relationship with employment. In contrast to popular hypotheses which suggest North Indian, Muslim,and Upper Caste households are more gender unequal, interestingly we only find robust confirmation for the hypothesis related to Islam in our regression framework. To further estimate the direct contribution of caste and religion in explaining the gendered time use gap betweengroups (as distinct from the contribution of differential distribution of covariates between groups), we supplement our regression results with Oaxaca-Blinder (1973) decomposition and Dinardo-Fortin-Lemeieux (1996) decomposition. These analyses confirm that caste and religion have complex and unexpected heterogeneous effects on the intensity of gendered timeuse. JEL Codes: J16, J21, J22, Z12, Z13