# **1. Introduction**

How women and men spend their time is one of the most important and least understood characteristics of people around the world. Data on the activities they do, the time they allocate to each activity and on who they were with at the time are not collected on a regular basis in most countries. However, such information could be effectively used to better understand the factors leading to gender inequalities in access to economic opportunities, well-being as well as the implications for policy making.

Time use studies are not new. They were first used in the early twentieth century to understand people’s lifestyle based on their time use patterns. Back in the 1930s, feminist scholars inquired into time use and the need to measure the “invisible” unpaid work of men and women (Reid, 1934). Further, the integration of the gender division of labor and unpaid work into the analysis of economic development and policies has been one of the main contributions of feminist economics to the field (Boserup, 1970).

In terms of large-scale data collection, Canada and the United Kingdom conducted time surveys in the 1960s, and were followed by Norway, Japan, Finland and Austria in the 1970s and 1980s (Ironmonger, 1999). By the end of the 1990s, developing countries started carrying out time use surveys and the instruments acquired a new focus. Currently, these surveys are being used around the world to improve estimates of national accounts (Suh and Folbre, 2016) and complement information on work missed in labor market surveys. For example, a comparison of time use and labor force surveys for South Africa reveals that the former captures more of paid work that both men and women do than the latter (Floro and Komatsu, 2011). Moreover, while the data to assess poverty rates at the individual level are not yet available, time use surveys have provided information to study the concept of time poverty.<sup>1</sup> This allows adjusting the measurement of such concept from the household to the individual level to assess gender differences in paid and unpaid work (Floro and Srivastava, 2017). Results of this type of analysis have shown that women are more likely than men to be time poor (Gammage, 2010; Bardasi and Wodon, 2010) especially in rural areas (Arora, 2015).

Time use surveys have also been used to further understand individual decisions to work as well as decisions on how to allocate time to different activities. A growing body of evidence shows that across countries: (i) women specialize in housework and care activities, while men focus on market work (Apps, 2004; Berniell and Sánchez-Páramo, 2011; Ferrant et al., 2014; Campaña et al., 2015); (ii) women work more hours in total than men when productive activities such as market work, housework and care are considered altogether (Haddad et al., 1995; Ilahi, 1999; Berniell and Sánchez-Páramo, 2011); and (iii) lifecycle milestones such as marriage and parenthood are the

> 1 The literature has defined the concept in different ways. According to Vickery (1977), time poverty refers to the notion that to stay above the poverty threshold, households need a minimum amount of time in addition to income. Goodin et al. (2008) define it as the deprivation of “discretionary” time.

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