Gender Inequalities in Allocating Time to Paid and Unpaid Work

This working paper analyzes paid and unpaid work-time inequalities among Bolivian
urban adults using time use data from a 2001 household survey. We identified
a gender-based division of labor characterized not so much by who does what type
of work but by how much work of each type they do. There is a trade-off between
paid and unpaid work, but this trade-off is only partial: women’s entry
into the labor market tends to result in a double shift of paid and unpaid work.
We also find very high levels of within-group inequality in the distributions
of paid and unpaid work-time for men and women, a sign that, beyond the sexual
division of labor, subgroup differentiation is also important. Using decompositions
of the inequality in the distribution of total time spent at work, we show that
gender plays an important role in determining the proportion of paid to unpaid
work done by individuals, but it plays a lesser role in determining the higher
total workload of some individuals relative to others.