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Feminist Approaches to Time Use

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Gender and Time Use in a Global Context

Abstract

The recognition that unpaid work time needs to be incorporated in all analyses of the economic choice, both in individual decision making and in the study of economic growth, business cycles, and the effects of macro policies on individuals is a fundamental tenant of feminist economics. The analysis offered goes beyond simply adding up time by emphasizing other important aspects of time use like who else is around, the time of day when an activity takes place, and subjective well-being of time use. On the macroeconomics side, the representative agent model is rejected for models in which consumers differ by gender, age, sexuality, race and ethnicity, migration status, and income class. Time poverty and its relationship to income poverty and the macroeconomic effects of recession and austerity are also explicitly analyzed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Benería et al. (2015), for a comprehensive review of the debates over the “Accounting Project” pp. 192–198.

  2. 2.

    The “$1 a day” line corresponds to the upper poverty line of $370 per person a year poverty line introduced by the World Bank (1990). The lower poverty line was introduced as $275 per person a year. Both figures are in constant prices adjusted for purchasing power parity. Since then, the upper poverty line was adjusted in 2008 to $1.25 a day, and again in 2015 to $1.90 a day.

  3. 3.

    In addition to time poverty, feminist scholars have conceptualized a deprivation in terms of “work intensity” which refers to “the length of an average (paid and unpaid) working day” and the incidence of ‘likely to be stressful’ overlapping work activities (Benería et al. 2015, p. 216). For a review of the feminist scholarship on time poverty and work intensity, see Benería et al. (2015).

  4. 4.

    The term comes from Bittman et al. (2003) but has become widely used.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Economics Department, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, USA

    Rachel Connelly

  2. Economics Department, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, USA

    Ebru Kongar

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  1. Rachel Connelly
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  2. Ebru Kongar
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Correspondence to Rachel Connelly .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Bowdoin College Dept of Economics, Brunswick, Maine, USA

    Rachel Connelly

  2. Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, USA

    Ebru Kongar

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Connelly, R., Kongar, E. (2017). Feminist Approaches to Time Use. In: Connelly, R., Kongar, E. (eds) Gender and Time Use in a Global Context. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56837-3_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56837-3_1

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