1 Introduction

The feminist study of time use is an interdisciplinary field with contributions from sociology, psychology, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, economics, and other social sciences. While all but one of the contributions in this volume are by economists, they nonetheless represent a range of approaches to economics as well as feminism. What all of the studies in this book have in common, however, is the belief that gender is an important analytical category in scholarship about the ultimate economic question, the scarcity of time and the choices we make in how we use our time.

Feminist inquiry into time use and which activities are or should be considered as work dates back to the 1930s, when Margaret Reid (1934) introduced the third-person principle. According to this principle, an activity is considered work, if a third person can be paid to perform that activity. Work can be paid or unpaid, and many of the studies in this volume focus on unpaid work. As unpaid work is performed disproportionately by women, its inclusion in microeconomic and macroeconomic analyses has been one of the main contributions of feminist scholarship to economic inquiry. In particular, feminist scholars have argued against the conceptualization of unpaid household work as unproductive and consequently the conceptualization of the housewife as a dependent of the (male) income-earner in the household in microeconomic analyses. With the entry of more women into the economics profession in the 1970s (Strassmann 1999), analyses of labor supply decisions as a trade-off between utility foregone from leisure in return for wages have been problematized, as within this framework, unpaid labor, which neither yielded utility nor income, had no place. Feminist scholars pointed out that attempts to “add women and stir” (Benería et al. 2015) or “shoehorn” unpaid work into this framework (Power 2004) led to problematic arguments such as that women love doing unpaid work. As Nelson (1995) stated, “while economists and census takers have waffled back and forth on whether unpaid housekeeping should be classified as leisure or work (Folbre 1991), the women scrubbing the sink rarely entertained any doubt” (Nelson 1995, p. 142). Similar arguments were made about whether child caregiving should be considered work or leisure (Connelly 1992, 1996). In macroeconomic analyses, feminist scholars have challenged the theorized unproductive housewife, who, by definition, made no productive contributions to the larger economy either – a viewpoint which has historically predominated systems of national accounts and macroeconomic thought (Folbre 1991).

While feminist scholarship has transformed economic thought since the 1970s, the undervaluation of unpaid work and invisibility of gender as a category of analysis in economic analyses and policy debates continue.Footnote 1 For instance, in mainstream macroeconomic debates, work–life reconciliation policies are either ignored or treated as if they should take a backseat to the traditionally male issues of what Boushey (2015, p. 2) refers to as “the three M’s: military, macroeconomics, and manufacturing.”

While a rose is a rose is a rose, the insights of feminist thinkers have taught us that, time is not time is not time. The importance of including time spent in unpaid care activities in any analysis of time is a central focus of feminist scholarship. This time tends to be highly valued by both the caregiver and the receiver – in fact, a matter of survival for the receiver in some forms – and yet is undervalued by the marketplace which relies on (primarily) women’s “good graces” to ensure that things that need to get done are done. In addition, the feminist approach reminds us that individuals interact with the market as members of families with strong and deep senses of obligation and gendered expectations which are slow to change even in situations where the economy is changing rapidly. The authors of the studies in this volume contribute to the feminist understanding of gender as a socially constructed concept, which takes on different meanings in different institutional contexts and over time. Interacting with other social categories, gender shapes our experiences, disadvantaging some groups while privileging others, particularly, in the sharing of burdens and benefits of resources, including and especially time. Overlapping advantages or disadvantages due to gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability status, age, rural/urban residence all influence how we use our time, as they intertwine in our complex and changing economies/societies.

With time use such a large and important topic, no single volume can cover everything. Instead we have sought to provide a breath of both topics and geographical contexts in order to expose the reader to the type of issues that can and should be considered in a feminist approach to the economics of time use. By bringing together these contributions, the book aims to fill gaps in our knowledge of gender differences in time use, as well as expand our understanding in the factors that affect these differences. Most of the chapters include new cutting-edge research. In addition, each chapter includes fuller literature reviews than are usually included in journal articles. These literature reviews put the original scholarship of our authors in context and serve as an introduction to the landscape of feminist explorations of time use.

We have divided the volume into two parts. Part I includes eight studies that introduce and analyze the two-way relationships between gender inequalities and norms on the one hand and macroeconomic phenomena and policies on the other. Four of these chapters focus on the Great Recession and the subsequent policy responses along with their gendered outcomes. Part II encompasses topics that focus on individual and family decision making (broadly conceived) on time use (also broadly conceived). Of the nine micro-oriented chapters, eight of them are empirical studies of time use around the globe focusing on age groups from children to elders. Studies in this section include topics that range from an expanded view of time as multidimensional as opposed to simply adding up minutes over a day, a week, or a year, to time trades among family members and the subjective well-being of experienced time. In the rest of this chapter, we introduce these studies, placing them in the respective literatures to which they contribute. Our discussion is intended to both introduce the chapters of this volume, but also provide a stand-alone structure for all of us as we consider the workings of an economic system as embedded within a specific societal context.

2 Macroeconomic Topics in Time Use and Gender

The macroeconomic chapters included in this volume review and expand on the existing literature of gender and macroeconomics in five key areas. The first is engendering macroeconomics, by this we mean integration of gender as a category into analysis of macroeconomic phenomena and policies. The results of this line of inquiry are inclusion of household production of goods and services in system of national accounts, and models that incorporate household production as well as its gendered distribution into macroeconomic models. These feminist models reject the representative agent formulation since representative agents are genderless, ageless, raceless, etc. The second topic explored by the authors is the two-way relationships between women’s and men’s burden of unpaid work and macroeconomic developments and policies. The third and related area of macroeconomic inquiry explored in this volume is the analysis of the effect of the Great Recession on unpaid housework and care work. The fourth topic is poverty, which is conceptualized as both not having enough income and also not having enough time, and also as capability deprivation. The final topic is the heterogeneity between the macroeconomic experience of rural versus urban area as it interacts with gender and class inequalities and affects migration patterns. We explore each of these five topics in more detail below.

2.1 Engendering Macroeconomics

İlkkaracan (this volume) reviews the gender and macroeconomics literature, with emphasis on its four main contributions: making unpaid care work visible in national accounts; identifying gendered outcomes on unpaid work burden of macroeconomic developments (e.g. economic crises) and policies (e.g. structural adjustment programs and austerity measures); incorporating unpaid care work and gender into macroeconomic models; and envisioning a feminist approach to sustainable economic development.

While most of the gender and macroeconomics literature has developed since the 1990s, that women can be affected differently by economic development processes was first pointed out by the seminal work of Ester Boserup (1970). Boserup (1970) also offered gender division of labor as a factor in determining the gendered outcomes of development processes. Feminist scholarship since Boserup (1970) has emphasized the importance of incorporating unpaid work and gender division of labor into the analysis of development processes and policies, and also the importance of bringing a critical lens to development processes and policies. For instance, as early as 1981, feminist scholars have argued that development outcomes should be evaluated from the perspective of poor women in the Global South (Benería and Sen 1981). Since the 1980s, feminist scholarship has critically examined the gendered outcomes of neoliberal policies (structural adjustment programs) in the Global South, and also how gender norms and inequalities shaped growth and development outcomes. Extensive feminist scholarship that has developed since Boserup (1970), now falls under the broad umbrella of the Gender and Development (GAD) approach, and examines the two-way relationships between gender (norms and inequalities) and development (processes and policies) (Benería et al. 2015).

The capabilities approach developed since the 1980s by Amartya Sen (1985) and Martha Nussbaum (2000), provides an alternative to neoliberal development policies and is more consistent with feminist approaches that view the goal of economic policy and inquiry as improvements in well-being of women, children, and men. Capabilities approach defines well-being as the ability to reach one’s full potential, and development as a process of expanding people’s capabilities, and was operationalized by the United Nations Development Programme in 1990 through the creation of the Human Development Index (HDI). The 1990 Human Development Report begins with the following statement:

People are the real wealth of a nation. The basic objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives. This may appear to be a simple truth. But it is often forgotten in the immediate concern with the accumulation of commodities and financial wealth. Technical considerations of the means to achieve human development…have at times obscured the fact that the primary objective of development is to benefit people. (UNDP 1990, p. 9)

Defining human development as a process of enlarging people’s choices, the report presents the first HDI, a measure of average achievement in “three foundations for human development are to live a long, healthy and creative life, to be knowledgeable, and to have access to resources needed for a decent standard of living” (UNDP n.d.a.). Countries are ranked based on their index values, and classified as having achieved “very high,” “high,” “medium,” or “low” level of human development. The 2015 statistics show that a majority of the countries studied in this book have achieved “very high” human development (UNDP 2015, Table 1, pp. 208–210). Particularly, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, South Korea, the US, and the UK are all classified under “Very High Human Development.” China and Turkey are in the next category of “High Human Development,” followed by India and South Africa in the “Medium Human Development” category, and Tanzania in the “Low Human Development” category (UNDP 2015, Table 1, pp. 208–210). However, when within-country inequalities in life expectancy, education, and income are taken into account, the ranking of some of these countries changes considerably. For instance, two highly unequal economies, the US and South Africa, move down the ranks by 20 and 15 countries, respectively, while some countries do not experience a change in their ranking (e.g. Turkey), and others such as Tanzania and Hungary move up the rankings (by 4 and 10 countries, respectively) (UNDP 2015, Table 3, pp. 216–219). Similarly, when gender differences in these indicators are taken into account, some of the countries studied in this book that have been classified as having achieved very high human development, for example, the US, Ireland, and the UK end up in the second tier in terms of gender development, and others such as Turkey fall further down to the fourth tier (UNDP 2015, Table 4, pp. 220–213). Gender inequalities in political representation and labor force participation vary considerably across countries, including among the countries in each group (UNDP 2015, Table 5, pp. 224–227), but women’s participation in paid work is lower than men’s across all country groupings, while women shoulder more of the unpaid work burden, and women have less discretionary time than men across all country groupings (UNDP 2015, p. 119).

As pointed out by Benería (this volume) and others (Esquivel 2016; Floro and Willoughby 2016), achieving gender equality requires the transformation of power relations by gender, race, class, ethnicity, as well as, within and among nations. In other words, “empowerment without power” (Esquivel 2016, p. 14) is not possible. Development frameworks, which provide alternatives to neoliberal policies, such as the capabilities approach, have been criticized for having had limited success in challenging the structures that produce and reproduce inequalities (Elson and Balakrishnan 2012). Specifically, the human development approach by UNDP discussed above, and policies that have emphasized “inclusive growth” (e.g. by the EU), or “sustainable development” (e.g. by the World Bank), which have been helpful in terms of thinking about reformulating development policy, in implementation have morphed into approaches that do not challenge the structures that produce and reproduce inequalities (Elson and Balakrishnan 2012).

The Great Recession has brought renewed critical attention to unregulated financial markets and the neoliberal policies that promote them. Within this context, another universal normative framework that provides an alternative to neoliberal policies has emerged: the human rights approach, which evaluates macroeconomic policies through the lens of human rights, and reminds us that governments that have ratified a human rights convention can be held accountable (Balakrishnan and Elson 2011; Balakrishnan et al. 2016). This approach emphasizes economic and social rights, which, among others include the right to an adequate standard of living, and satisfaction of basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter (Balakrishnan et al. 2016). The human rights framework and other approaches that have provided alternatives to neoliberal policies are not mutually exclusive or contradictory. For instance, macroeconomic policy can be evaluated by investigating the “role of human rights obligations in safeguarding and expanding capabilities” (Balakrishnan et al. 2011, p. 153). However, the human development framework has been argued to have more potential to bring about transformative change (Benería et al. 2015).

Globally, a post-2015 development agenda for all countries was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015 (United Nations (UN) 2015, emphasis added). The agenda encompasses 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets including ending poverty in all its forms everywhere (Goal 1); ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being of all at all ages (Goal 3); ensuring inclusive and quality education for all and promoting lifelong learning (Goal 4); and achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls (Goal 5); promoting inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all (Goal 8); reducing inequality within and among countries (Goal 10) (United Nations (UN) 2015). The proposed targets for meeting Goal 5 include recognizing and valuing unpaid care and domestic work (United Nations (UN) 2015). Feminist scholarship has long argued that development problems are not limited to economies in the Global South, and studies included in this book provide further evidence of development problems in economies of the Global North through a gender lens. Nor is development a unidimensional or a linear process. For instance, the US has yet to mandate paid parental leave, while other countries ranked lower than the US, including in terms of level of human development, have long had provisions for paid parental leave.

2.2 Two-Way Relationships Between Gender Inequalities and Economic Crises and the Subsequent Policy Responses

The 2007–2008 recession lasted 18 months in the US – eight months longer than the average recession in the post-World War II era, and the 4 percent decline in US output was unprecedented in any recession during this period (NBER 2010). From the financial markets in the Global North, the crisis spread to the rest of the world in a global economy (Elson 2010; Fukuda-Parr et al. 2013). The gendered effects of the recession and the subsequent policy measures varied greatly in different economies around the globe. In the US, Canada, and Europe, immediate job losses came disproportionately for men who predominate in manufacturing and construction employment, leading to the characterization of the recession as “he-cession” (Karamessini and Rubery, this volume; Kongar and Price, this volume; MacPhail, this volume). While men’s unemployment rate increased more also in the Central and South Central Europe and East Asia, as well as in Latin America and the Caribbean, in North Africa, women’s unemployment increased more, and in Southeast and South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, women and men experienced similar trends in unemployment rates (Ghosh 2013).

In the aftermath of the recession, women lost more public sector jobs due to state budget cuts in the US and austerity measures in Canada and in the eight EU countries Karamessini and Rubery examine (Karamessini and Rubery, this volume; Kongar and Price, this volume; MacPhail, this volume). In the US, Canada, and the UK, men recovered jobs faster than women, initially suggesting a “he-covery,” but women have recovered all the jobs they have lost and more in the US by the end of 2014 (Hartmann et al. 2014) and in Italy, Hungary, and Iceland, women’s employment grew more than men after 2011 (Karamessini and Rubery, this volume). While in the pre-crisis period, women’s employment in EU countries, on average, increased in absolute terms, during the crisis the narrowing of the gender employment gap was primarily through downward harmonization, that is, primarily due to more job losses for men, but also, in part, due to an “added worker” effect in these economies (Karamessini and Rubery, this volume). Narrowing of the gender employment gap due to disproportionate job losses for men and to some extent also due to women being pushed into the workforce is not a desirable mechanism for gender convergence from a feminist perspective, which sets the goal of economic activity and inquiry as social provisioning of needs and expansion of capabilities. Moreover, in all of the EU economies examined by Karamessini and Rubery, the share of involuntary part-time work increased for both women and men, and evidence from the US shows an increase in non-standard work schedules for women with less than a college education during the recession, and also among African-American mothers, white mothers, and Hispanic fathers (Kongar and Price, this volume). In the Global South, there is evidence of an increase in precarious forms of employment and in unpaid family labor (Antonopoulos 2013). In Ireland, the UK, and Spain, defamilialization of care and other policies that promote gender equality seems to have been halted and even reversed in the austerity period (Karamessini and Rubery, this volume). Of all institutional changes in the eight EU countries examined by Karamessini and Rubery (this volume), one constant is the continued influence of neoliberal policies in the economic and political landscape (Benería this volume).

Austerity measures and fiscal reconciliation in EU economies after the Great Recession are in stark contrast to gender-sensitive responses to economic crises that have been advocated by feminist scholars. Investment in care sectors rather than physical infrastructure, for instance, leads to more poverty reduction, faster recovery from the recession, and more job opportunities for women (Antonopoulos 2013; Ilkkaracan, this volume). Evidence from the responses to the 1991–1992 recession in Sweden, and to the 2001–2002 recession in Argentina shows that gender-sensitive countercyclical policy responses protect women from more adverse outcomes of the recession and the policy responses in its aftermath (Ghosh 2013). For instance, in Sweden, work–life family reconciliation policies were maintained in the aftermath of the recession, along with the welfare programs that both created public employment for women and protected them from the adverse effects of the recession in terms of unpaid work burden were maintained and even expanded due to emphasis on employment programs. In Argentina, similarly, social inclusion and protection policies were maintained and expanded, including after the 2007–2008 recession. However, even in Argentina, the counter-cyclical measures after the most recent recession, such as expenditures on large public works projects have benefited men more than women, possibility due to faster growth in male-dominated sectors (Ghosh 2013), as gender was not explicitly included in policy agendas.

2.3 Unpaid Housework and Care Work in Hard Times

A full account of the gendered outcomes of the recession requires examinations of its impact on the reproductive sphere, as well as for health and well-being of women and men and children. Economic crises are hypothesized to increase women’s unpaid care work burden under most scenarios (Elson 2010). Using data from the 2010 Canadian time use module in the Statistics Canada General Social Survey, MacPhail (this volume) finds support for the hypothesis of an increase in women’s relative unpaid work burden.

Increasing economic hardship in households has long-term well-being effects, including for children, through its impact on food security, educational opportunities, and income and time poverty. Known as “economic scarring,” the long-term impact of the recession includes the time parents spend caring for their children, and the time families spend together. Morrill and Pabilonia (2015) find that in the US, couples with household children under the age 19 spend less time together when the state unemployment rate is between 8 and 10 percent, and that this is likely due to an increase in mothers’ non-standard paid work hours between these unemployment rates. Kongar and Price (this volume) show that the burden of household adjustment during the crisis is a phenomenon that describes the experiences of low-SES households, as well as African-American and Hispanic households, compared to their respective counterparts. Their results show that gender norms play a significant role in shaping outcomes of the recession, which is consistent with Elson’s (2010) framework for analysis of the recession through a gender lens. For instance, Kongar and Price (this volume) find that fathers provide more primary child caregiving when the unemployment rate rises above 6 percent, however, this is more likely to be the case in households where mothers’ paid work hours increase. Further they find an increase in non-standard work hours of white mothers, African-American mothers, African-American fathers, and Hispanic fathers. Taken together with the findings for child caregiving time, what emerges is a picture of increased hardship during the recession, especially in households most affected by the recession in terms of labor market outcomes.

2.4 Poverty: Income Poverty, Time Poverty, and Poverty as Capability Deprivation

While each country around the globe sets its own poverty line below which a person is considered to be poor, a global measure of income poverty was also introduced by the World Bank in the 1990 World Development Report. Defining poverty as “the inability to attain a minimal standard of living” (p. 26), the World Development Report set as the poverty line “$1 a day” and estimated that 1,115 million people in the developing countries lived in poverty in 1985.Footnote 2 While women have received particular attention in poverty discussions since the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action due to some evidence of “feminization of poverty” – that women are poorer than men, and the share of women among the poor has been increasing since the late-1970s – the data to assess whether there is a global trend of feminization of income poverty are not available (Benería et al. 2015; Fukuda-Parr 1999; Razavi 1999). However, a growing body of evidence indicates that women are poorer than men in other aspects, namely in terms of capabilities and also in terms of time. The concept of time poverty, that is, the notion that to be able to stay above the poverty threshold, households need a minimum amount of disposable time in addition to a minimum amount of disposable income, was introduced for the first time by Vickery (1977). Time use surveys, conducted since the 1960s in some industrialized economies, and in most countries by the end of the 1990s, allow researchers to calculate the percent of women and men who are time poor (Berik et al. 2015). Feminist scholarship on time poverty has adjusted its measurement to the individual, rather than the household level, allowing for assessment of gender differences in time poverty due to gender disparities in paid and unpaid work burden.Footnote 3 Maria Sagrario Floro and Abhilasha Srivastava (this volume) review the time poverty literature since Vickery (1977), which has contributed to our understanding of the gender dimensions of time poverty in the Global North (Hochschild and Machung 1989; Kalenkoski et al. 2011), and in the Global South (Antonopoulos and Memis 2010; Bardasi and Wodon 2010; Gammage 2010). Gender analyses of time poverty in developing country contexts show that women are more likely to be time poor in Guinea (Bardasi and Wodon 2010), in Guatemala (Gammage 2010), and in South Africa (Antonopoulos and Memis 2010), especially in rural areas and in poor households (Arora 2015 for rural Mozambique). Similarly, multi-tasking or “work intensity” has been identified as a form of time poverty that characterizes primarily women’s time use (Benería et al. 2015).

Other studies have focused on the impact on well-being of paid and unpaid work activities. For instance, exploring this question for Canada, MacDonald et al. (2005) find that, all kinds of unpaid work, but especially eldercare and housework, increase time stress for women, while unpaid work activities are rarely associated with time stress for men, possibly because men participate in more enjoyable forms of caregiving (p. 90). (Also see Craig et al, this volume; Kalenkoski, this volume).

Time poverty, when defined as a form of capability deprivation, brings into question to what extent does our time use reflect choice or the lack thereof. Floro and Srivastava (this volume) take on this question in the South African context, using data from the 2000 South African Time Use Survey. They examine the unemployed and the underemployed, a group who wants more paid work, but cannot find enough or any of it that fully utilizes their skills and abilities. At the same time, they work long hours, albeit primarily in unpaid work activities, and have very little time for rest and leisure. Floro and Srivastava find that the majority of those who face this double-bind are women, as gender interacts with constraints at the household level (lack of wealth), and institutional constraints such as inadequate access to public infrastructures and basic services such as safe water, health centers, and public transportation. They argue that to break the cycle of time and income poverty requires both creation of decent employment opportunities for women as well as men, and also the provisioning of affordable care services to relieve women of care responsibilities. As Floro and Srivastava argue, these policies would be the opposite of the supply-side policies pursued since 1994 that have led to jobless growth.

To account for care work, Folbre (2006) argues that a “common denominator” between money and time is needed for full accounting of care of dependents, given that, on average, “men tend to devote more money, and women more direct care time” (p. 195). A similar dilemma emerges in measuring the extent of the “dual burden” of time poverty and income poverty. Specifically, there is need for a measure that encompasses both income poverty and time poverty. The Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP) responds to this need. Antonopoulos et al. (this volume) apply LIMTIP to the analysis of 2005 Buenos Aires Time-Use Survey data. They identify 11 percent for households, 16 percent of individuals, and 28 percent of children under the age of 18 as income poor in 2005 – considerably higher than the official estimates of 6 percent of households and 9 percent of individuals, and 16 percent of children. Time poverty estimates identify the “hidden poor” who are above the official poverty line, but who do not have the time necessary for unpaid (care and domestic) work, and cannot afford to purchase market substitutes without falling below the poverty line. The hidden poor become visible when their poverty line is adjusted to reflect the monetized value of their time deficit. Time deficits are found among the unemployed, as well as among low-wage workers, and interact with gender inequalities in the unpaid work burden. Like Floro and Srivastava (this volume), Antonopoulos et al. call for a combination of gender-sensitive labor market and care policies. While job creation reduces income poverty among the unemployed and the underemployed, low-wage employment, only pushes women and men into time poverty and without lifting them out of income poverty. As emphasized by Karamessini and Rubery (this volume), absent public provision of affordable good quality care services, women’s effective integration into employment results in “either some form of exploitation of the labor of other women or in a care deficit” (p. 68). The need for public provision of care services is an over-arching theme across the studies of Turkey, South Africa, Tanzania, Buenos Aires, EU countries, and the US.

2.5 Rural-Urban Divide Interacts with Gender and Class Inequalities Affecting Migration Patterns

Smriti Rao (this volume) brings a gender lens to rural-urban and urban-urban migration in India. She and others have argued that India is an example of a macroeconomic context that has not generated employment opportunities in urban areas for less well-educated workers. Instead export-oriented manufacturing “employment” developed more in terms of subcontracting to home-based workers (Ghosh 2002). Rao finds that migrating for economic reasons remains limited to a small group of well-educated and well-off married women, or women without a male breadwinner. Comparing these results to trends observed in China, South Korea, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Mexico, where growth of large, labor-intensive manufacturing sector in urban areas has pulled less well-educated women into the labor force (Ghosh 2002), Rao concludes that, economic migrant women are, for the most part, truly absent in India, that is, their absence is not simply a problem with the data collection. But taking a broader view of migration, substantial numbers of women in India are migrating to urban areas as a result of marriage or as “followers” of their migrating husbands. The prevalence of marriage migration indicates that in the absence of employment opportunities, marriage to an urban dweller remains a way to secure a livelihood for large numbers of less-privileged and less well-educated rural women. Whether access to employment opportunities empowers women requires a careful analysis, as while it may be a source of empowerment and poverty reduction (Kabeer and Mahmud 2004; Kabeer 2011), it may also be a symptom of extreme poverty and “the distress sale of labour,” (Kabeer 2000, p. 322).

3 Microeconomic Topics of Time Use and Gender

Most empirical studies of individual’s time use treat time as unitary and linear. By unitary, we mean that every minute of time is devoted to one use and one use only. Unitary time could be added up; this is what we mean by linear time. If time is unitary, we can add up time spent each minute and it will add up to 24 hours a day. We say women work 9 hours on home production and 4 hours on paid work, have 3 hours of leisure time, and they sleep 8 hours a day. Men work 3 hours on home production, 8.5 on paid work, have 4.5 hours of leisure, and sleep 8 hours a day. The activities thus aggregated are not always done all together. The leisure may come some in the morning and some in the evening, but we add it together and consider only the total. While most time use studies and survey instruments think about time as linear and unitary, there are many problems with this approach which must be explored through a gendered lens. The extensions beyond the unitary and linear characterization of time are: what we are doing with our time matters; we often do two or more activities at the same time; when we do what we do matters; family members trade time among themselves; and how we feel while we are doing something matters as well as what is produced with that time. Each of these extensions is explored by one or more of the authors in this volume.

3.1 The Purpose to Which We Devout Our Time Matters

The chapters in the micro section are mostly empirical studies of time use in a variety of global contexts. They begin, however, with a conceptual piece by Julie Nelson urging us to reconsider what we mean by care work. If care work and gender differences in the time spent providing care are measured, then various forms of care work and measures of the differences in women’s and men’s care work should be constructed (Folbre 2006). Folbre (2006) urged us to broadly define care work (mostly unpaid and mostly performed by women) to include both direct care work and indirect care work. Nelson pushes us at both ends of Folbre’s admonition. Nelson argues firstly that not all work that on the surface appears to be direct care work is done with caring as the motivation. However, all work is potentially caring and we need to hold production units (firms) to the same standards of caring as we hold individuals. As we can find examples of non-caring behaviors in the household (even behavior that is abusive and harmful), we can also find examples of caring behavior in the larger economy, including in the social care economy (Starr 2011) and solidarity economy (Benería, this volume; İlkkaracan, this volume), but also in the for-profit sector.

3.2 At Any Moment of Time We Can Be Doing More than One Thing

As discussed above, one form of time poverty is “work intensity,” which is doing more than one task at a time. Sometimes doing two things at the same time makes both activities better, like a good conversation accompanied by a nice meal, but much of the time the two activities are in tension with one another, making the time spent in this joint endeavor less effective in some way – less enjoyable or less productive or more stressful – think about trying to cook dinner and soothe the baby at the same time. Either way, doing two things at the same time is not the same as doing x minutes of activity A and T-x minutes of activity B. The implications of this insight is that total time in all activities can add up to more than 24 hours a day, but that we have to consider time doing two (or three) things at once as different from solo activity time.

Deborah DeGraff and Rebecca Centanni explore this aspect of time use in their chapter, “Double Shift, Double Balance: Women’s Employment and the Intensity of Home Production Time.” In this chapter, DeGraff and Centanni explore differences in the way employed and not employed women do housework. The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) assumes unitary time use: only the primary activity is recorded with the respondent expected to choose which activity is the primary activity. But the ATUS does ask who is present in the room while the activity is taking place. Doing housework with children present in the room can be thought of as two activities, doing housework and watching children. Are employed women more likely to do housework in the presence of children in order to seek out more time in the day with their children or are they less likely to do housework in the presence of children as they have much more limited time in which to accomplish a set of household tasks and they need to get through them as quickly as possible? Notice that under both scenarios doing two things at the same way is not equal to adding up some minutes of housework and the rest of the time as child caregiver, but it is unclear whether the joint time is more than the sum of its parts or less than the sum of its parts. DeGraff and Centanni find significant differences in the “presence of children” behavior of employed and not employed mothers, with employed mothers doing less of their housework in the presence of children.

3.3 When We Do What We Do Matters

Another issue in (Micro) Time Use 2.0 is that time of day and sequencing matters. The linear model simply adds up time spent throughout the day with equal weights. However, having five minutes of leisure each hour is different from having an hour of leisure all together. Sometimes having time disaggregated into small pieces is a good thing, but mostly bigger chunks of time are better, until the chunks get too big. We can have not enough time – we can have too much time.

Dorrit Posel and Erofili Grapsa carefully consider these issues in the context of elderly South African and the presence of a social pension. Using the 2010 South Africa Time Use Survey they use a creative optimal matching and cluster analysis approach to identify five types of South African women and separately five types of South African men who are 60 years of age or older. The clustering into five groups uses the full pattern of the time use on the survey day. They find that one group spends a substantial amount of time in the middle of day on housework, while another spends a substantial amount of time on employment. The third and fourth group spend most of their time in leisure activities, but differ in whether the modal activity is mass media consumption versus social activities. Finally, the last group spends most of his or her time on personal care which includes sleeping, eating, and health activities. The proportion of men and women in these groups is quite different and the patterns of time are also different between men and women. Receiving a social pension makes one more likely to be in the groups dominated by leisure activities.

Posel and Graspa also report fascinating results on the question of whether the South African elderly have too much time, not enough time, or the right amount of time to complete what they want to accomplish in a day. Not surprisingly many of the elderly report having too much time, but most were satisfied with their time allotment and this was true for each of the clusters. Only some of those in the employed cluster reported having not enough time.

3.4 We Live with Others and Trade Time

One aspect of time that is lost when we concentrate on the individual 24 hour constraint is that time is tradeable, meaning any individual can ultimately have more or less than 24 hours available on any given day. If I do your laundry which would have taken you an hour, I have just given you an hour. Trading time happens every day within families. The chapters by Esther Rothblum; Margaret Maurer-Fazio and Rachel Connelly; Deborah DeGraff, Deborah Levison, and Esther Dungumaro; and Ebru Kongar and Emel Memiş each focus on how family members trade-off time among themselves.

Rothblum’s focus is on the division of labor within a same-sex couple. Tradeoffs among household labor, as well as, tradeoffs within the couple between specializations in market work versus housework are considered in this thorough literature review. While the topic is interesting for its own sake, increasing our understanding of time use among a growing segment of the coupled population in developed countries, researchers also study same-sex couples in an attempt to separate gender effects from sexuality effects. The theory that women do more of the housework in order to “do gender,”Footnote 4 that is, to signal to their male partners and to society at large that they are role-conforming women, would predict that the division of labor within a couple would be more shared in same-sex couples already not-conforming to heterosexual norms of behavior. Other theories of human behavior have also been employed to predict differences in the division of labor between same-sex couples versus different-sex couples. Rothblum’s review includes works from economics, sociology, and psychology. There is agreement among the empirical studies produced by researchers from each of these disciplines that same-sex couples do divide housework and child caregiving tasks more equally than different-sex couples. Controlling for the gender of couple members, income differentials are found to have less predictive power in the division of labor within the household. These findings are important caveats to the standard neoclassical genderless model of economic decision making.

Maurer-Fazio and Connelly also consider time tradeoffs, but in the context of larger extended family households of rural China. Their study focuses on the effect of household composition and ethnicity on the time use of adults in rural China. They divide adults into four age groups: young adults, prime-age adults, mature adults, and older adults because individuals in these age groups often play very different roles within the household, with the youngest ones sometimes still in school, the prime-age ones tending to their own young children and establishing their economic presence, the mature adults maintaining their rural home and farm and also caring for young grandchildren, and the older adults winding down their involvement with income-generating work and perhaps needing some daily care. The analysis also separates men from women as time use is expected to be gendered and separates the rural population into Muslim minority groups, non-Muslim minority groups, and Han Chinese. The authors find that controlling for age and ethnicity, the group most affected by the presence of others in the household is the mature adults who seem to serve as the safety value, performing extra work when prime-age adults are not around or when elders and young children are present in the household, reducing their work effort when younger adults are available.

Because rural to urban migration is quite common in the areas of China from which the data for this study is drawn, Maurer-Fazio and Connelly also consider the relationship between the time use of rural household members and the absence of migrating household members. Again, mature adults are most affected in their time use pattern, adding time in both the unpaid and the income-generating categories. Young adult women are affected by the absence of young adult men, adding unpaid work time, while prime-age women are affected by the absence of young adult women, adding income-generating work time, but reducing somewhat their unpaid work time.

Our gaze shifts from rural China to rural Tanzania with the analysis by DeGraff, Levison, and Dungumaro of a unique data set focused on time spent collecting wood and carrying water. These essential tasks of everyday life in the poorest areas of the world require a tremendous amount of time and physical effort which can be reduced by the presence of a village well and the availability of alternative cooking fuels. Boys and girls aged 10 to 17 are analyzed separately, though both spend large amounts of time gathering wood and carrying water. Interestingly, differences between the boys and girls depend on who is the informant. When the youth is the informant, boys spend more time than girls; when their mother is the informant, girls spend more time than boys. Almost every mother sampled participates in both of these time-consuming tasks in addition to many other household and agricultural tasks.

Tradeoff between children and mothers is evident in the study, but so is the tradeoff between carrying water and purifying the water. In the village which has a public water tap, mothers spend more time purifying water than in the village where the water needs to be carried longer distances. Thus, the simple infrastructure of a village well can both save the time of carrying and increase the health of village residents as they use some of their saved time to make the water safer to drink. The lesson here is that time used on one task affects the amount of time used in other tasks, but time use also affects well-being more generally.

Overall, rural residence across the world increases the demand for time devoted to unpaid work and is an important determinant of women’s nonparticipation in the paid labor force in many countries such as Turkey (Kongar and Memis, this volume) and India (Rao, this volume). In addition, the extra demands on time that come from reduced levels of infrastructure have the effect of making time poverty is more severe in rural areas compared to urban areas. Certainly in Tanzania adult women have no time left for leisure given the high demands on their time from all that they do. In rural China, Maurer-Fazio and Connelly (this volume) argued that prime-age women and men did not respond much to the absence of household members away because of migration in part because they were already working all the possible hours of a day.

Work–life reconciliation policies, particularly public spending on child care and paid parental leave policies, shape gender division of paid and unpaid work within the household. Previous studies have shown that the impact of parenthood on the gender employment gap is smaller in EU countries with welfare regimes more conducive to women’s labor force participation (Anxo et al. 2007). Using data from the 2006 Turkish Time-Use Survey, Kongar and Memiş (this volume) find a similar result for Turkey. Specifically, they find that the male breadwinner norm predominates among married and cohabiting couples, and parenthood exacerbates these gender disparities. They attribute these findings to the gendered welfare regime, specifically to the gender–asymmetric parental leave policy that creates a clear disincentive to hire women and to the limited public provision of affordable quality child care services in Turkey.

3.5 Since We Are Putting in the Time, We Are Impacted Immediately by Our Time Use

Differences in how we use our time depends on our own preferences for the commodities we produce with our time inputs and other ingredients (market purchased goods, public goods, intermediate home-produced goods, etc.) and the demands of others in our households (a crying child, an elder in need of assistance, a husband demanding an ironed shirt, etc.). These demands are affected by many things including gendered expectations (see Rothblum, this volume). In addition, we must consider how we feel while engaging in any particular time use. If we like the creative activity of cooking, we are more likely to engage in this activity given the same level of preference for good food and demands of family members than if we dislike the messy and stressful activity of cooking. This aspect of embodied time use is sometimes referred to as “process utility.” Process utility is only a part of the total utility one gains from the time use, the rest of the utility comes from the consumption of the commodity produced. Process utility is certainly not a new idea, but we have only recently have sustained and comprehensive data collection efforts devoted to collecting information aimed at measuring process utility.

Measuring process utility is complicated by the fact that individuals differ in general levels of reported well-being. In other words, some people are either by nature or by self-report generally happy and upbeat and others are less so. Because of these differences in levels, one needs to be careful considering the individual response to an individual time use activity as a measure of the process utility of that time use activity and group averages are also subject to systematic differences in levels that are not necessarily informative. While a dollar is a dollar and a minute is a minute, a reported happy moment for one person is quite different from a reported happy moment for another person. In a sense, this insight goes back to Samuelson’s impossibility theorem which argues that we cannot assess utility across individuals.

New data collection efforts provide some insight into the well-being aspects of time. Charlene Kalenkoski’s chapter makes an important contribution to this area of time use research by using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which includes a global well-being measure and several well-being measures of individual activities. Most other data sources provide one or the other. For example, the ATUS 2010 contain subjective well-being modules which collect emotional responses to three time use activities in the respondent’s yesterday’s activities, while the General Social Survey (GSS) contains several global well-being measures each year. Kalenkoski’s chapter shows the value of having both measures, as she controls for one’s global well-being level in her analysis of activity-level feelings among older married adults in the US.

Specifically, she finds that after controlling for global well-being, older men report that caregiving activities for their wives have lower levels of tiredness and pain than other activities. Caregiving activities of older women do not elicit differences in any measured emotions in caregiving for their husbands compared to other activities. Kalenkoski notes though that even with the PSID data, we cannot distinguish fully between the process utility and the utility that comes from having completed a task that needed completing, in other words, between process utility and total utility.

The chapter by Lyn Craig, Judith Brown, Lyndall Strazdins, and Jiweon Jun also considers the effect of time use on well-being, but focuses particularly on the reduction of well-being caused by stress. The analysis focuses on time spent on market work versus unpaid work. Households where men and women each divide their time fairly evenly between market work and unpaid work are labeled equal sharing households as opposed to gender specialized households, where women do most of the unpaid work and men do most of the paid work. The authors of this chapter compare stress levels reported by men and women in equal sharing households versus specialized households. This comparison is made across three countries with very different work/policy regimes: Australia, Finland, and Korea. The authors find large differences in the proportion of households in each of these countries who can be described as equal sharing households and hypothesize that being part of an equal sharing household is more stressful when fewer households live that way. The data support this hypothesis and also one that predicts that high employment hours make sharing paid and unpaid work time more stressful. Finland is shown to have the largest percent of equal sharing households and has the lowest average employment hours for men of the three countries.

4 Conclusion

While policy makers tend to ignore the demands of unpaid work time, in our day-to-day life we are all well aware of the importance of time, including that we do not have enough of it, or that we have too much of it due to forced idleness in labor markets that do not generate enough good job opportunities.

Despite the cliché, time really is the ultimate scarce resource and how we use our time defines who we are and what we produce. In addition, who we are and what we produce are affected by our gender, race, ethnicity, and other characteristics, and the opportunities and constraints in the communities in which we live. Both micro and macro inquiries will be improved to the extent that we consider fully the implications of gendered time use in its multi-dimensions.

Since the 1980s, an extensive feminist economic literature has emphasized the importance of shifting the focus of economic inquiry away from economic growth at the macro level, and income at the micro level, to expansion of capabilities and improvements in well-being (See for instance, Power 2004; Folbre 1995; Nelson 1993). In such a framework, regardless of where the activity takes place (markets or household), and regardless of whether it is paid or unpaid, the activity and its impact are folded into an essential component of economic inquiry. Through a gendered lens, identifying gender differences in these types of work and their burdens and benefits is key to improving well-being of women, children, and men. Studies in this volume offer a number of directions institutional and macroeconomic policies can go to enable all women, children, and men have the ability to both be and do.