The gender division of labour, in which men tend to specialise more in paid work within the market, and women tend to specialise more in unpaid work within the home, is a feature common to modern Western society. Economic theory suggests that the price an individual can command in the labour market for an hour of their time plays a key role in determining the way in which they allocate their time between different uses. This is the case in models of individual utility maximization, in which the wage determines the optimal degree of substitution between purchased goods and services and domestically produced output, and also in models that emphasise the gains to intra household specialization and trade.
However, it is not clear to what extent in practice gender wage differences explain the observed gender division of labour. The importance of social norms regarding gender stereotypes and innate biological differences in the capabilities of men and women may swamp the role of gender wage differences in the allocation of time.
The question of the role of wage rates is important because it gives an indication of how far trends towards gender equality in educational attainment (i.e. in market human capital) and in labour market opportunities (i.e. in the returns to that human capital) will result in a more equal division of labour. There are numerous reasons why female specialisation in unpaid domestic work may be the subject of concern in a gender equity sense. For example, domestic human capital may be of little value relative to market human capital outside a specific relationship, and so lead to less bargaining power within the relationship (via a lower external threat point) and poorer outcomes in the event of relationship breakdown.
This paper uses data from the UK 2000 Time Use Survey to explore the relationship between wage rates and the intra-household allocation of time in a matched sample of spouses. A key feature of the dataset is that both spouses in a household simultaneously completed time diaries, and hence the data are not subject to problems of retrospective recall or error in the reporting of one’s spouse’s time allocation.
The study analyses gender differences in paid and unpaid work alongside one another, as both theory and intuition suggest that an individual’s time allocation decisions are determined simultaneously. This contrasts with much work in the area, which tends to focus on gender gaps in one or other type of work in isolation. Maximum likelihood estimation is used to produce estimated labour supply functions for husbands and wives, for time in both paid and unpaid work.
These labour supply functions estimate coefficients on an individual’s own wage (which captures the relative gain to an hour’s market work versus an hour spent in non-market activities) and on their wage relative to their spouse (which captures incentives for intra household specialisation and/or bargaining power). These estimates then form the basis for a Oaxaca-Blinder type decomposition of the mean gender differences in weekly hours in paid and unpaid work, which allow us to draw some conclusions as to the importance of gender wage differences for the division of labour in the UK.
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