Working from Home and COVID-19: The Chances and Risks for Gender Gaps

As the COVID-19 pandemic causes a record number of people to work from home, this disruptive event will likely have a long-lasting impact on work arrangements. Given existing research on the effects of working from home on hours worked and wages, an increased availability of working from home may provide a chance for women to catch up with their male counterparts. Yet, the need to simultaneously care for children during the COVID-19 lockdown may also revive traditional gender roles, potentially counteracting such gains. We discuss the likely effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender gaps in the labour market and at home in light of recent empirical findings and novel statistics on the heterogeneous structure of work arrangements among couples. We construct a novel teleworkability index that differentiates between fully teleworkable, partly teleworkable and on-site jobs and find that in about a third of households the COVID-19 shock is likely to induce shifts in the intra-household allocation of tasks from mothers to fathers.

Do you have time to take a walk together? Private and joint time within the household*

We develop a theoretical model for the intra-household allocation of time and consumption that distinguishes between partners’ joint and private leisure. Estimating the model using time use data leads to five findings. First, the intra-household expenditure distribution correlates with relative wages, consistent with the collective model. Second, men put relatively more weight on private expenditure and composite leisure. Third, joint and private leisure are imperfect substitutes. Fourth, joint and private leisure are independent of the wage distribution, suggesting that togetherness does not substitute for economic factors. Fifth, higher female wages imply higher childcare hours for women, but lower for men.

Using smartphone app collected data to explore the link between mechanization and intra-household allocation of time in Zambia

Digital tools may help to study socioeconomic aspects of agricultural development that are difficult to measure such as the effects of new policies and technologies on the intra-household allocation of time. As farm technologies target different crops and tasks, they can affect the time-use of men, women, boys, and girls differently. Development strategies that overlook such effects can have negative consequences for vulnerable household members. In this paper, the time-use patterns associated with different levels of agricultural mechanization during land preparation in smallholder farming households in Zambia were investigated. A novel data collection method was used: a pictorial smartphone application that allows real-time recording of time-use, which eliminates recall bias. Existing studies analyzing the intra-household allocation of resources often focus on adult males and females. This study paid particular attention to boys and girls as well as adults. The study addressed seasonal variations. Compositional data analysis was used to account for the co-dependence and sum constraint of time-use data. The study suggests a strong gender differentiation for land preparation activities among mechanized households; for households using manual labor, such differentiation was not found. There is some evidence that the surplus time associated with mechanization is used for off-farm and domestic work. The study cannot confirm concerns about negative second-round effects: mechanized land preparation is not associated with a higher workload for women and children during weeding and harvesting/processing. The study provides a proof-of-concept that smartphone applications can be used to collect socioeconomic data that are difficult to measure but of high relevance.

Inequality, Poverty, and the Intra-Household Allocation of Consumption in Senegal

Intra-household inequalities have long been a source of concern for policy design, but there is very little evidence about their effects. The current practice of ignoring inequality within households could lead to an underestimation of both overall inequality and poverty levels, as well as to the misclassification of some individuals with regard to their poverty status. Using a novel survey for Senegal in which consumption data were collected at a disaggregated level, this paper quantifies these various effects. In total, two opposing effects, one on mean and one on inequality, compensate each other in terms of the overall poverty rate, but individual poverty statuses are affected. Intra-household consumption inequalities account for 14 percent of inequality in Senegal. This study has also uncovered the fact that household structure and organization are key correlates of intra-household inequality and individual risk of poverty.