this pattern is not consistent across countries and rural women and men in Albania, Guatemala, Turkey, and West Bank and Gaza assign slightly more time to market work (Table 6). At the same time, Panel A of Figure 9 shows that the gender gap in the amount of time devoted to paid work is slightly wider in urban areas. On average, men work 3.1 more hours than women per day, compared to a difference of 2.9 hours per day in rural settings.

In contrast, the amount of time that individuals devote to unpaid domestic work is larger in rural settings. On average, urban women spend 4.8 hours per day in this activity, compared to 6.1 hours per day for rural women. Men, on the other hand, spend 1.4 and 2.5 hours of unpaid domestic work in urban and rural areas, respectively. This could be explained by a higher substitutability between market activities and domestic work in rural areas, since household production can be used directly for own final use. This result is consistent with the patterns of longer hours of market work in urban areas for both women and men. Women in rural areas spend 3.6 more hours than men in unpaid domestic work, compared to 3.5 hours per day in urban areas. Overall, rural residence increases the number of hours devoted to unpaid work and explains women’s low participation in the paid labor force in countries such as India (Rao, 2017) and Turkey (Kongar and Memis, 2017).

# **5. Time Use over the Lifecycle**

For this analysis, we use a household typology that reflects transitions though the lifecycle based on age and parenthood. While the data constitute cross-sections rather than a panel, the information can be analyzed to see how activity patterns change with age and lifetime events such as household formation.<sup>14</sup> We distinguish between seven stages: (i) youth (15-19 years of age); (ii) men (women) of childbearing age (20-44 years) without children, living in a household where no other women (men) of childbearing age are present; (iii) men (women) of childbearing age (20-44) with children, living in a household where no other women (men) of childbearing age are present; (iv) men (women) of childbearing age (20-44) without children, living in a household where at least one woman (man) of childbearing age is present; (v) men (women) of childbearing age (20-44) with children, living in a household where at least one woman (man) of childbearing age is present; (vi) mature men (women) (45-64), living without children in the household; and (vii) mature men (women) (45-64), living with children in the household. As previously mentioned, children are defined as 14 years of age or less, except for South Africa and Pakistan where we define children as 6 years of age or less.

Youth is the stage of the life cycle where both men and women work fewer hours in the market. Young men dedicate on average 1.9 hours per day to paid work compared to 0.8 hours for women (Panel A of Figure 10). Men’s time devoted to this activity follows and inverted u-shape pattern, that is, men’s time allocated to the market peaks in cohabitation and when transitioning into

> 14 Nationally representative time use surveys rarely follow individuals over time.

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