# 1. Background

Representative surveys on individuals’ time use are important for understanding economic decision-making among men and women and highlighting broader inequalities within and across households. Effective design, targeting and evaluation of policies/projects related to workforce development, childcare provision, and improvements in transportation services, among others, also require an accurate measurement of men’s and women’s time use and time use disparities across different sub-populations.

Available time use surveys reveal cross-country gender disparities in time allocations to different activities, including unpaid domestic and care work, which are often missed in labor force surveys and socioeconomic household surveys (Charmes, 2019; Hirway, 2017). While time use data collection has been implemented in varying formats across countries – either as part of stand-alone time use surveys or part of a time use module that is part of a labor force survey or a socioeconomic household survey, time use data collection in low- and middle-income contexts relies either on an interviewer-assisted recall-based time use diary – usually for the last 24 hours, or recall-stylized questions about time allocation to relatively aggregate groups of activities over a given reference period, which can be the last day, the last 7 days or the last 30 days (UN Women, 2021).<sup>2</sup> These survey design choices have raised concerns regarding potential cognitive errors in recalling time use (Seymour et al., 2020), particularly in contexts with lower literacy and numeracy and where economic activities are less predictable, including in countries where smallholder agriculture is prevalent (Arthi et. al, 2018; Field et al., 2023).<sup>3</sup> Activities conducted in tandem may also be more difficult to recall, depending on how often an activity occurs (regularity) and how distinguishable it is from other activities (saliency) (Menon, 1993; Brown et al., 2007). These errors can occur over shorter reference periods as well (Sudman and Bradburn, 1973).

Although these measurement challenges might have direct implications for our understanding of gender disparities in time use (Floro and Miles, 2003; Budig and Folbre, 2004) and analytical applications that rely on time use data, including the design and evaluation of gender-sensitive policies to improve economic opportunities and well-being for men and women (World Economic Forum, 2021; King et al., 2021), there is scant evidence on how relying on recall-based survey methods may impact accuracy and reliability of time use data. Recall-based diaries can also be time-consuming to implement, and recent work (Field et al., 2023, ILO, 2023; Folbre, 2021) has discussed the role of streamlined time use diaries (by reducing or aggregating the number of activity categories, for example) as an alternative to more intensive data collection.

> 2 Within these approaches, however, there is substantial variation across countries and years — including, for example, the choice of activity sets over which to report; the length of the reference period; the reliance on self- versus proxy reporting; the extent of interviewer assistance; and whether time use data collection is designed as a standalone survey or is part of an existing household survey (see UN Women, 2021, for a discussion). Open-ended diaries without pre-defined time intervals have also been used, but rarely (see Chatzitheochari et al.,2018, for a discussion).

> 3 Farming follows an inherently irregular schedule that is often determined by factors outside the control of the farmer, such as climate variability, and the specific tasks involved in farming are often very repetitive (e.g., weeding, harvesting, and sorting).

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