THE GENDER DIVISION OF WORK ACROSS COUNTRIES

Charles Gottlieb (1, 2, 3) , Cheryl Doss (4) , Douglas Gollin (4) , Markus Poschke (5, 6)

1 AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques
2 AMU - Aix Marseille Université
3 AMU ECO - Aix-Marseille Université - Faculté d'économie et de gestion
4 Tufts University [Medford]
5 CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research
6 McGill University = Université McGill [Montréal, Canada]

Across countries, women and men allocate time differently between market work, domestic services, and care work. In this paper, we document the gender division of work, drawing on a new harmonized data set that provides us with high-quality time use data for 50 countries spanning the global income distribution. A striking feature of the data is the wide dispersion across countries at similar income levels. We use these data to motivate a macroeconomic model of household time use in which country-level allocations are shaped by wages and a set of “wedges” that resemble productivity, preferences, and disutilities. Taking the model to country-level observations, we find that a wedge related to the disutility of market work for women plays a crucial role in generating the observed dispersion of outcomes, particularly for middle-income countries. Variation in the division of non-market work is principally shaped by a wedge indicating greater disutility for men, which is especially large in some low- and middle-income countries.

Mots clés: labor supply; home production; care work; time use; gender inequality; gender norms

Domaines: Economies et finances

Charles Gottlieb, Cheryl Doss, Douglas Gollin, Markus Poschke. THE GENDER DIVISION OF WORK ACROSS COUNTRIES. 2024. ⟨hal-04556343⟩