The Contribution of Girls’ Longer Hours in Unpaid Work to Gender Gaps in Early Adult Employment: Evidence from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam

Abstract

Across many countries, girls perform more unpaid work than boys. This article shows how the time young women and girls spend in unpaid household work contributes to the gender pay gap that is already evident by age 22. The study analyzes employment participation, type of employment, and wages using five waves of the Young Lives longitudinal survey for Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. Spending longer hours in unpaid household work in adolescence positively predicts later employment participation but has a scarring effect in negatively predicting job quality (that is a job with a private or public organization) and hourly earnings, particularly for women. Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions of the gender wage gap show young women’s penalty for past household work is due to longer hours of such work rather than a higher penalty for women for a given amount of unpaid work.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Participation in unpaid household work and paid work is gendered from a young age.

• Time in unpaid household work as children impacts young adults’ employment.

• Time in household work in adolescence is linked to lower job quality in adulthood.

• Girls’ longer hours in household work contribute to the gender wage gap.

• Girls spend less time than boys in play or leisure at all ages.

KEYWORDS:

• Young adults
• gender wage gap
• life course
• unpaid household work
• gender inequality

JEL Codes:

• J16
• J22
• J71

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank three anonymous reviewers, the editorial team, and participants at the 2021 IAFFE conference for their helpful comments and suggestions for improving this paper.

Notes

1 Local currency units were converted to US dollars using daily real exchange rates from Thomson-Reuter Datastream.

2 Employees in companies/cooperatives/public sector/government organizations also had greater access to in-work benefits (for example, health insurance, holiday pay, sick leave, maternity benefits).

3 Caution is required in the interpretation interaction effects in non-linear estimations (Ai and Norton 2003).

4 In separate estimations by gender, concurrent caring and chores are only significant in the female estimation.

5 They are also significant in separate estimations for men and women (not reported).

6 The largest coefficient effect driving the gap is that of subjective health at age 8.

7 Other significant negative endowment effects reducing the gap are those of Vietnam and of being married/cohabiting while the endowment effect of having a children is positive, widening the gap.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fiona Carmichael

Fiona Carmichael is Professor of Labor Economics at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the employment of marginalized workers with particular emphasis on inequalities and vulnerabilities, including those relating to gender, caregiving, ageing, and disability. This research has included investigations of: trade-offs between paid work and unpaid caregiving; barriers to work faced by women and older workers; retirement decisions; disability and work; and work and wellbeing of young people in developing countries.

Christian Darko

Christian Darko is Lecturer in Applied Business and Labor Economics at UoB. His research focuses mostly on developing countries and examines the process of human capital development, the role of family background, and intergenerational transmission of inequality, and how these impact individual outcomes, including labor market, education, wellbeing, and health. He employs a range of methods in his research including statistical analysis of large-scale secondary panel data and primary data including survey data that he has collected in Ghana as part of a British Academy/Leverhulme funded project in Ghana.

Shireen Kanji

Shireen Kanji is Professor of Work and Organization at Brunel Business School, Brunel University London. Her work focuses on the interconnections between gender, work, and social inequality. She is particularly interested in making visible the connections between paid and unpaid work and has pursued this interest in relation to the factors associated with the paid working hours of men and women, opposite-sex couples’ division of paid and unpaid work, and how grandparents provide care for grandchildren. She is a member of Brunel’s Center for Artificial Intelligence.

Nicholas Vasilakos

Nicholas Vasilakos is Associate Professor in Sustainable Business Economics and Public Policy at the University of East Anglia. He is faculty member of the Center for Competition Policy and the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research. Nicholas’s research interests lie between the intersection of responsible regulation, sustainable development, and policy evaluation. His recent work focuses on evaluating: the effects of regulation and policy on market behavior; the effectiveness of policy intervention in developing countries on issues relating to labor markets performance, economic activity, and distribution of wealth. His work has been cited by various government organizations, including the US Treasury and the OECD.