Women spend long hours on unpaid work in India. The routine household chores involve cooking, maintenance of household with cleaning, washing etc. Women in poor income households do manual drudgerous labour and those who can outsource these chores could still be involved in supervision of the chores. The long hours on unpaid work leaves them less time to engage in paid employment and spend on leisure. We were curious to know if women reduced the time spent on unpaid work when they engaged in paid employment. 

The first country wide time use survey (TUS) in India was conducted in 2019. Using the unit level data collected from 1.4 lakh households and 4.5 lakh individuals, we probed the relationship between paid and unpaid work when women engaged in different types of employment. Using the International Classification of Activities for Time Use Statistics (ICATUS) 2016, we identified self-employment and wage employment. A basic regression framework is used in which time spent on unpaid work is the dependent variable and the type of employment interacted with the level of education is the main independent variable of interest. The four levels of education are not literate, primary and middle, up to higher secondary, graduation and above. We have controlled for household variables available in the data set such as number of adult men, women and children in the household, marital status of the woman, industry of the household (agriculture or non-agriculture), monthly consumption expenditure of the household.

For self-employment, the coefficient of the interaction between employment and education shows that with high levels of education (upto higher secondary), there is a significant (although marginal) reduction in time spent on unpaid work. Therefore, being in employment and having fairly high levels of education is associated with some reduction in time spent on unpaid work.  For example, with an hour participation in self-employment, there is a reduction in unpaid work by 0.07 hours (4.2 minutes) for the higher secondary educated women, compared to women with no education for rural women. Notably, for women with graduate and above education, this reduction is not significant. The result remains with controls and urban sector too. 

We checked if the time trade off exists when self-employed women do unpaid work simultaneously with other activities. But, irrespective of the unpaid work involving simultaneous activities or not, there existed a tradeoff. However, the extent of trade off slightly increased when unpaid work included simultaneous activities. 

In the case of wage employment, in contrast, no tradeoff is observed between time spent on employment and time spent on unpaid work, for any level of education compared to the base category. For an urban graduate woman in wage employment, an hour of wage employment is increasing unpaid work by 0.11 hours (6.6 minutes) and with controls it is 0.13 hours (7.8 minutes). The kind of unpaid work that urban women did after engaging in wage employment was domestic work for household members. 

The positive co-efficient of the urban graduate women was checked with controlling for household infrastructure variables such as primary sources of energy, type of washing clothes, and sweeping of the floor. For all three variables, manual work by household members was taken as the base. The results remained the same after controlling the household infrastructural variables. 

It is likely that the nature of urban wage employment as well as household structure in urban areas do not facilitate a trade-off. It is likely that norms, household structure (nuclear rather than joint) do not allow for women to reduce unpaid work time when employment time increases. TUS 2019 does not have data on norms and related variables. 

Author’s affiliation is National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, India. This paper is a collaborative work with Rosa Abraham and Srinivas Raghavendra, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, India. 

Cover image by Vijayamba R. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.