Centre for Time Use Research - information gateway
Centre for Time Use Research - information gateway
The project relies on the assumption that women who specialise in non-waged work, as a result reduce their paid work hours and participation rates, leading to a reduction in their rate of human capital formation. Initial differentials in human capital, and attitudes to gender-roles, may be the starting basis for bargaining over the distribution of paid and unpaid work roles within a heterosexual partnership. If one partner differentially specialises in unpaid work, her (rarely his) human capital declines relative to the more paid-work-specialised partner, leading to an intensification of work-role differentiation over time.
The degree and continuity of commitment to the labour market is dependent also on public regulation. A given division of domestic labour has varying potential effects on partners’ paid work participation, depending on various regime attributes. Normal weekly hours of paid work, levels and costs of childcare provisions, temporal service accessibility, parental leave rights, parental-leave-related employment protection, and so on, all have major consequences for participation in paid work. Regime provisions interact with the private household norms and circumstances to determine the outcome of negotiations over work-roles.
This is essentially cross sectional: considering couple households, controlling for educational attainment, current employment mix etc, to establish the extent of the negative relation between women’s share of domestic work and shadow wage differential. The cross-sectional approach has various evident problems: processes of selection into couples, and within couples into joint employment statuses - disentangling requires longitudinal data.
Two longitudinal data sources (BHPS and HoL) will be fused to produce well-grounded panel estimates of gender time use balances throughout the 1990s. The objective is to construct models of (i) selection into particular household and employment statuses, (ii) relationships between inter-temporal changes in (or constancy of) attitudes to parental responsibilities and change in these statuses, and (3) changes in (relative, shadow) wages of husbands and wives associated with employment and family status changes, controlling for (changes in) parenting attitudes.
The obvious question is: do national patterns of cross-sectional domestic divisions of labour show variation associated with regime provisions?
Less obvious, and potentially more revealing, however, we shall look at “clock-time” evidence from the diaries (and the whole-week work schedules in the HETUS studies). How do couples’ schedules through the day match with each-other and with the times of service provisions? Can the aggregate time use patterns and associations with wage differentials be traced to regime-related differences in patterns of task-sharing?
So, for example, do countries with short work-hours and high levels of childcare provision have more two-job couples staggering their work times so that one partner delivers child to childcare and the other collects, while countries with longer work hours and scarce childcare, have more conventionally gendered arrangements?
