Gender Norms and the Gendered Distribution of Total Work in Latin American Households

ABSTRACT

This study uses time-use survey data for Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador (from 2009, 2010, and 2012, respectively) to analyze differences between countries in terms of the gendered distribution of total work, which includes both paid and unpaid work. It explores whether the variations in the total time worked by women and men, and, particularly, the gender gap unfavorable to women, can be explained by substantive national differences in gendered social norms. Using data from the World Values Survey (WVS; 2010–14), this study computes a gender norms index to measure cross-country differences in gender norms. It finds that more egalitarian countries exhibit higher levels of equality in the gendered distribution of total work.

KEYWORDS:

• Time use
• Mexico
• Peru
• Ecuador
• gender differences
• gender norms

JEL Codes:

• D13
• J0
• Z13

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This paper was partially written while José Alberto Molina was Visiting Fellow at the Department of Economics at Boston College (United States), to which he would like to express his thanks for the hospitality and facilities provided. This paper has benefited from funding from the Spanish Ministry of Economics (Project ECO2012-34828) and a pre-doctoral grant, awarded by the Government of Aragon in Spain and co-financed by the European Social Fund (BOA, December 2, 2014).

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2017.1390320

Notes

1 The care economy includes both paid and unpaid labor and refers to the fact that women, when they do work for pay, are more likely than men to work in fields of “caring labor” (such as health, education, and domestic service).

2 More information on the technical aspects of the surveys, including their coverage and representativeness, can be found at the websites of corresponding statistical agencies.

3 See Esquivel et al. (2008) for a review of the inclusion of simultaneous activities in diaries and measurement issues of these simultaneous activities. Esquivel (2010) describes other methodological issues, such as the inclusion of a time-use survey as a module in an ongoing household survey, the use of an activity diary instead of a task-list classification, the consideration of simultaneous activities, and the statistical significance of time-use estimates. Though cross-country differences in unpaid domestic work, childcare, and other care may reflect methodological differences in terms of instruments, classification schemes, or age groups covered, among others, Debbie Budlender (2010) argues that such differences cannot explain more than a small proportion of the differences, and thus comparability across surveys is still valid.

4 The reference country is Ecuador. See Supplemental Online Appendix A for further explanation of the demographic weights, and see Supplemental Online Appendix Table A1 for a description of the demographic characteristics of the samples. We use demographic weights to allow for a proportional representation of individuals in the three countries.

5 See Supplemental Online Appendix B for a description of all the activities included in each time-use category. One important limitation of the surveys is that they do not include information on secondary activities or who else is present during the activity, information that has been shown to be important in the computation of the total time spent with children (Sevilla-Sanz, Gimenez-Nadal, and Fernández 2010). A recent estimate by Shira Offer (2014) reveals that only about one-quarter of all time spent with children is spent in direct interaction.

6 To conduct robustness checks, we changed the way we built the gender norms index to test for the validity of our results. Results are shown in Supplemental Online Appendix Table C8 and are consistent with our main results. It is interesting that for attitudes 2, 3, and 4, the values for women exceed those for men, suggesting that women are less “traditional” and more likely than men to value women in non-traditional roles. Yet, for attitudes 1 and 5, which have to do with women’s roles, the mean for men exceeds that for women. Thus, it may seem that attitudes 1 and 5 are related to gender roles in a different way than questions 2, 3, and 4. This may explain why the relative weights given to attitudes 1 and 5 are comparatively lower than weights given to attitudes 2, 3, and 4. Results excluding these attitudes from the gender roles index (see Supplemental Online Appendix Table C8) are consistent with our main results.

7 The fact that the average values of the attitudes vary between men and women is common even in the most egalitarian countries. Arlie Hochschild with Anne Machung (1990) show that even when men and women demonstrate equivalent behaviors, men are more likely than women to embrace traditional values.

8 See Supplemental Online Appendix Table C1 for a description of the sociodemographic and household characteristics of individuals in the three countries. Supplemental Online Appendix C (Table C2 and Table C3) shows the time men and women devote to paid work, unpaid work, childcare, other care, and total work, taking into consideration whether the men and women are a heterosexual couple (married and cohabiting) or not. We found that, in the cases of Mexico and Ecuador, gender differences in total work are much greater when women do not have a partner. Supplemental Online Appendix C (Table C4 and Table C5) shows the time men and women devote to the different activities, taking into consideration the presence or absence of children under age 18 in the household. The presence of children in the home accentuates gender differences in total work, particularly in the case of Ecuador.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juan Carlos Campaña

Juan Carlos Campaña is a PhD student at the Economic Analysis Department of the University of Zaragoza (Spain). His main research area is microeconomics and, particularly, household and population economics, regional economics, and well-being, with specific interests in gender differences in the time devoted to housework, childcare, and leisure. His works have been published in several journals, including Journal of Development Studies and Applied Economics Letters.

Jose Ignacio Giménez-Nadal

Jose Ignacio Giménez-Nadal is Lecturer in the Economic Analysis Department at the University of Zaragoza (Spain), where he obtained his PhD in Economics in 2010. He is also a member of the Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI) of the University of Zaragoza. His main research area is microeconomics and, particularly, household and population economics, regional economics, and well-being, with specific interests in gender differences in the time devoted to commuting, housework, childcare, and leisure. His works have been published in several journals, including European Economic Review, Demography, Feminist Economics, and Journal of Population Economics.

José Alberto Molina

José Alberto Molina received his PhD in Economics from the University of Zaragoza (Spain) in 1992. He was Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business Studies of the University of Zaragoza for a decade (2005–15), and President of the Spanish Association of Deans of Economic and Business Studies from 2009 to 2011. He joined IZA as Research Fellow in September 2006. His main research area is microeconomics and, particularly, household and population economics, labor economics, and well-being, with a specific interest in intrahousehold allocation and intergenerational transfers.