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Time Allocation and Women’s Life Satisfaction: Evidence from Spain

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Abstract

We use data on Spanish dual-earner couples to analyze the relationship between time allocation patterns and women’s life satisfaction. In line with evidence from other countries, we find that part-time jobs yield (on average) higher levels of life satisfaction than do full-time jobs. This paper shows that life satisfaction is affected by the combination of paid work time and unpaid responsibilities. In particular, being responsible for most of the housework reduces life satisfaction for full-time female workers. An analysis by subgroups reveals that having a part-time job and doing most of the housework is associated with greater life satisfaction but only among women with caring responsibilities, without a university education, or with self-reported conservative values. Finally, we explore the role of mismatches between actual and preferred time allocation. Women with part-time jobs are more (resp. less) likely to report mismatches in working (resp. housework) time than are women with full-time jobs. The type of time mismatch that most penalizes working women’s subjective well-being is actually doing less housework than desired. This evidence could help explain the observed “life satisfaction penalty” on full-time female workers. Overall, our findings underscore the continued dominance of traditional gender norms in Spanish households.

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Notes

  1. Time use patterns may affect several measures of subjective well-being—for instance, job satisfaction, leisure satisfaction, and marital happiness. Here we are interested in satisfaction with life as a whole. This measure has been shown to be an aggregate of satisfaction with different domains of life (Van Praag et al. 2003; Rojas 2006).

  2. Employees without small children are entitled to submit a request to reduce their number of working hours, but employers may cite business needs in refusing such requests.

  3. The strata were obtained by crossing the Autonomous Community and the population size of the household's county of residence. Within each stratum, the first-stage units are census sections, the second-stage units are private households, and the third-stage units are the individually selected working adults, one from each household.

  4. We restrict the sample to these periods because the questionnaire was modified in 2005; the changes affected some of the variables being analyzed, such as housework allocation pattern.

  5. The threshold of working hours that distinguishes full-time from part-time workers varies among countries, but it is usually either 30 or 35 h per week. According to the Spanish Statistical Office, part-time jobs cannot exceed 35 h per week and full-time jobs cannot require fewer than 30 h per week.

  6. Estimated coefficients for these other explanatory variables are available from the authors upon request.

  7. Since reported housework patterns reflect the perceptions of respondents, we cannot rule out the possibility that this result is due to unobservable factors that both reduce women's life satisfaction and increase their perception that they bear the bulk of housework. Additional data on couples' time use are needed before a robust relationship between these variables can be established.

  8. Using the 2002 family module of the International Social Survey, Luengo-Prado and Sevilla (2013) show that about 33 % of men and 39 % of women disagree with the following statement: "A man's job is to earn money; a woman's job is to look after the home and family".

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, Grant No. ECO2011-25661.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Economía Aplicada, Universidade de Vigo, Lagoas Marcosende s/n, 36310, Vigo, Pontevedra, Spain

    Begoña Álvarez

  2. Departamento de Economía Aplicada, RGEA, Universidade de Vigo, Lagoas Marcosende s/n, 36310, Vigo, Pontevedra, Spain

    Daniel Miles-Touya

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  1. Begoña Álvarez
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Correspondence to Begoña Álvarez.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 8.

Table 8 Ordered Probit coefficient estimates on added controls in specifications [2]–[4] of Table 4
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Álvarez, B., Miles-Touya, D. Time Allocation and Women’s Life Satisfaction: Evidence from Spain. Soc Indic Res 129, 1207–1230 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-1159-3

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