important drivers of the gender gap in time use patterns (Apps and Rees, 2005; World Bank, 2011). Fewer studies, however, have studied gender differences in time use patterns across multiple countries, mainly because of the lack of comparable quality data—information that is crucial to guide both research and policy design.

This paper updates and reinforces the findings of various scholars and those reported by the 2012 World Development Report (WDR) by examining gender differences in time use patterns in 19 countries of different income levels and from various regions. We harmonize data from time use surveys and household surveys with time use modules collected between 2006 to 2014 to make them comparable. We focus on four aggregate categories: market or paid work, unpaid domestic work, personal care activities, and leisure, social and study activities. We answer four questions: what is the gender gap in time use patterns in countries across the various regions and income levels? How do time use patterns vary according to individual and family characteristics? How do time use patterns change over the lifecycle? How do they change in response to family formation? While some of these questions have been covered by previous literature, to our knowledge few studies analyze time use patterns at this level of detail and over the lifecycle for a broad sample of countries. We hypothesize that this might be explained by the lack of comparable data (Esquivel et al., 2007) and the intensive requirements of data harmonization.

Our findings indicate that in all the countries included in our sample women specialize in unpaid domestic work, while men specialize in market work. This reinforces the results obtained by previous research from developed and developing countries (Benería 2003; Benería et al. 2015). However, the degree of specialization varies widely across settings. Evidence has shown that the gender gap in unpaid work is observed in all regions but is largest in Middle Eastern countries, mainly because men undertake considerably less unpaid work than in other regions, but also because women perform more unpaid work than their counterparts (Ferrant et al. 2014). Women in South Africa spend on average, over 2 hours more per day on domestic and care activities, while men spend over an hour more on production work (Budlender et al. 2001; Charmes 2006). In fact, regardless of labor force status, the amount of time that South African men allocate to unpaid work tends to vary less than that of women (Floro and Komatsu, 2011). Considering productive activities altogether, women work more hours than men in most countries and consequently, end up having fewer hours for personal care and leisure activities.

When comparing our findings with the ones reported by studies analyzing earlier periods, we conclude that countries have made some progress over the last years, but gender differences in time use persist. This is consistent with findings from developed countries where the number of hours that men allocate to domestic and childcare work increased slightly in the last decades (Sayer, 2016; Sullivan, 2011). However, such small increases have not translated into a significant change in women’s time use patterns. Furthermore, as women entered the labor force, feminist economists expected that there would be a complementary increase in men’s engagement in 3