to adults aged 18 years and older (Argentina). In 13 of the surveys the reference period is the previous day and the remaining 6 refer to the previous week. Only 5 of the instruments include information on secondary or simultaneous activities and 2 surveys ask about activities carried out in the presence of household children.

To allow for comparison across and within countries, we harmonize activities around four categories: market work, unpaid domestic work, personal care, and leisure, social and study activities. ‘Market work’ includes paid and unpaid work devoted to production of goods sold in the market, commuting to the workplace, and the time spent looking for work. ‘Unpaid domestic work’ includes productive activities for which markets could potentially exist, such as cooking, fetching water, cleaning, and care for children. ‘Personal care’ includes sleep, eating, and drinking, and other personal services such as hygiene, visits to the doctor, etc. Social activities include hobbies, games, recreation, sports, socializing, and so on.<sup>2</sup> We group the number of hours devoted to housework and childcare under the same category because at an earlier stage of this research we found that the latter was consistently underreported in all countries.<sup>3</sup> In general, the time allocated to childcare tends to be underestimated because it is done in conjunction with other activities and may go underreported when only primary activities are recorded. Adding a secondary activity to record childcare time would provide a more reasonable estimate of the total amount of time devoted to this task, but only 5 out of the 19 countries in our sample include the information. Alternatively, time with children could be measured when surveys ask the question ‘with whom’ data, but only 2 of the surveys in our sample do so. Thus, for the purposes of harmonization, we focus on primary activities and report the number of hours allocated to unpaid domestic work, a broader category that includes housework and childcare. This is a limitation of our analysis, since childcare and housework (mostly unpaid and performed by women) are also performed as secondary activities (Floro and Miles, 2003; Folbre et al, 2005; Folbre and Yoon, 2007a; 2007b). Hence, the unpaid domestic and care work category in this paper represents a lower bound estimate.

Time allocations are expressed in hours per day. The gender gap is calculated as the difference between the average number of hours per day men and women spend in the different activities on a daily basis. Our sample includes men and women aged 15 to 64 years of age.<sup>4</sup> Following the approach in the 2012 WDR, activity episodes are assigned a zero if not performed by the individual. This implies that we use the same sample of individuals to calculate the amount of time

> 2 Data on some specific activities are not available for a handful of countries: Argentina and Iraq do not include information on childcare activities, so unpaid domestic work only includes time allocated to household activities in these countries. Timor-Leste does not collect data on self-care and leisure, social and study activities. Argentina, Iraq and Mexico do not have information on time allocated to self-care.

> 3 This finding is consistent with previous studies such as the 2012 WDR (World Bank, 2011).

> 4 Argentina is an exception because the time use module was only applied to people aged 18 and above.

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