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Intra-household Time Allocation: Evidence from the Post-socialist Countries

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Abstract

This paper examines the division of household work in several post-socialist countries during their democratic transition period and compares them to advanced economies between 1994 and 2012. While female time allocation became more similar to that in advanced economies over time, some differences persist. Conventional determinants of time allocation to unpaid work at home are relevant in post-socialist countries; however, female time availability matters significantly less than in advanced economies. The Kitagawa–Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition suggests that differences between the regimes exist largely due to unobservable factors rather than determinants controlled for in this study.

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Fig. 1

Notes: The graph presents averages for all respondents regardless of marital status and gender. The data for 1988 is available only for a few countries. Survey weights are applied if available; otherwise, unweighted statistics are reported. Data source: ISSP Module “Family and Changing Gender Roles”

Fig. 2
Fig. 3

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Notes

  1. Fuwa (2004) considers four welfare regimes: social democratic (Norway and Sweden), conservative (Austria, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, West Germany), liberal (Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, and the United States), and former socialist (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Slovenia). The former socialist countries had the lowest gender equality scores in the sample.

  2. The task-sharing index summarizes who—a woman, a man, or both equally—is primarily responsible for doing a range of household activities typically perceived as female, such as cooking, cleaning, laundry, caring for sick family members, and grocery shopping.

  3. The Soviet notion of “gender equality” at work often involved gender segregation. For example, in the 1930s, factory directors and coworkers massively resisted employing or working with women in skilled positions, so women ended up working at the lowest paid and, often, most physically demanding jobs. To make sure that women were not prevented from working, the Soviet authorities began classifying jobs as either “male” or “female.” If the job could be done by a woman, it was classified as a “female job”. “Male jobs” were those women typically could not do, and, therefore, superior to “female jobs”. Such division enabled plants and factories running while most men were at war (Goldman 2001). Only in 2021, Russia lifted the early 1970s Soviet-era rule barring women from working in more than 350 professions that were considered harmful for reproductive health. An example of such professions is a truck driver or a boat captain (Maynes 2021). Another mechanism frequently used to mitigate the discrimination from men in mixed enterprises was creating female-only brigades (Goldman 2001).

  4. Ghodsee (2018) discusses state efforts to encourage men to participate in housework and childcare more actively in the 1950s in East Germany and Czechoslovakia.

  5. Appendix Figures D1 and D2 illustrate the unemployment rates and gender pay gaps during the transition.

  6. Detailed information about the data and country-specific details can be found in the codebooks: https://www.gesis.org/en/issp/modules/issp-modules-by-topic/family-and-changing-gender-roles. The next wave in this module is scheduled for 2022, and data will be published in spring/summer 2024.

  7. The Online Appendix can be downloaded here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9se0jh6e87yq9wa/Hhwork_Online_Appendix.pdf?dl=0

  8. The legal retirement age varies by country. I introduce a uniform age cutoff for all the countries because variation in age cutoff could introduce unnecessary heterogeneity in the sample. Using a cutoff of 55 years old for women and 60 years old for men leaves very few people who report labor force status as retired in the sample. As a robustness check, I replicated the main results using the retirement status reported by respondents. This approach yields very similar results to the ones obtained from the uniform age cutoff.

  9. During the focal time period, most countries did not legally recognize same-sex marriages, and the overall proportion of non-heterosexual couples was generally low (see Figure 1.1 from OECD report “Society at a Glance 2019”).

  10. The facts that the average household size is close to 3 and couples have on average one child (Online Appendix Table D1) support this assumption.

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  1. Economics Department, Trinity College Dublin, Room 3014, Arts Building Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

    Vitaliia Yaremko

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Yaremko, V. Intra-household Time Allocation: Evidence from the Post-socialist Countries. Comp Econ Stud (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41294-023-00229-3

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