Gendered Time Use and Its Heterogeneities: The Role of Region, Religion, and Caste

Is female labour force participation a good proxy for gendered time use? How do geography and the social institutions of caste and religion interact with the gendered distribution of time within Indian households? In this study, we use gender distance metrics, inspired by distance measures between vectors, to measure and document the extent to which time allocation within households is gendered. Importantly, the unconditional relationship between gender distance and labour force participation is not monotonic, and the linear relationship between the two is not statistically strong. Furthermore, we show that caste, religion, and region have distinct relationships with gendered time use metrics and with employment. In contrast to popular hypotheses which suggest North Indian, Muslim, and Upper Caste households are more gender unequal, interestingly, we only find robust confirmation for the hypothesis related to Islam in our regression framework. To further estimate the direct contribution of caste and religion in explaining the gendered time use gap between groups (as distinct from the contribution of differential distribution of covariates between groups), we supplement our regression results with Oaxaca-Blinder (1973) decomposition. These analyses confirm that caste and religion have complex and unexpected heterogeneous effects on the intensity of gendered time use. The results of the decomposition exercise suggest that caste and religious affiliation influence gender distance in distinct ways in the rural and urban sectors.