Women bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid household and care work across the world and especially in South Asia. However, due to the unavailability of nationally representative data on time use, a systematic analysis of the gender gap in unpaid household and care work has not been made in the context of India. The present paper, using the recent Time Use Survey (2019) data addresses two concerns. First, it examines the socioeconomic and demographic factors associated with variation in the time spent on unpaid household and care work among men and women. Second, it analyses how much of the gender gap in the time allocated to unpaid work can be explained by the difference in socioeconomic and demographic factorsof men and women by employing the Oaxaca-Blinder technique . The findings show that women spend much higher time than men in unpaid household and care work. We find that marital status, employment, having additional females in the household are the most important predictors of time devoted to unpaid household work among women. The decomposition results reveal that differences in socioeconomic and demographic factors between men and women do not explain most of the gender gap in unpaid household work. Our results suggest that it is not the rational economic choices that determine the division of household chores between women and men; instead, unobserved gender norms and practices  govern the allocation of unpaid work within Indian households.
Due to the unavailability of nationally representative data on time use, a systematic analysis of the gender gap in unpaid household and care work has not been undertaken in the context of India. The present paper, using the recent Time Use Survey (2019) data , examines the socioeconomic and demographic factors associated with variation in time spent on unpaid household and care work among men and women. It analyses how much of the gender gap in the time allocated to unpaid work can be explained by differences in these factors . The findings show that women spend much higher time compared to men in unpaid household and care work. The decomposition results reveal that differences in socioeconomic and demographic factors between men and women do not explain most of the gender gap in unpaid household work. Our results indicate that unobserved gender norms and practices most crucially govern the allocation of unpaid work within Indian households.
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We find that marital status, employment, having additional females in the household are the most important predictors of time devoted to unpaid household work among women.
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suggest that it is not the rational economic choices that determine the division of household chores between women and men; instead,
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