Stuck in the Middle: Off-Farm Employment and Caregiving Among Middle-Aged Rural Chinese

ABSTRACT

Using the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) 2011–12 baseline data, this contribution explores to what extent taking care of grandchildren and frail parents influences rural middle-aged Chinese adults’ off-farm employment. The findings show that, conditional on socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, taking care of grandchildren has a negative effect on rural middle-aged men's and women's off-farm job participation and hours worked. Caregiving for parents does not have the same negative effects on off-farm employment and hours worked. Furthermore, the study finds that annual earnings are also negatively affected by caregiving responsibilities, especially for women and men taking care of grandchildren.     

Women's Work Choices in Kenya: The Role of Social Institutions and Household Gender Attitudes

This study considers the factors that influence women's work behavior in Kenya. In particular, it examines whether gender attitudes and certain types of social institution influence the probability of employment or type of employment for women. Using data from the Demographic and Health Survey of 2008–9, it finds that religion and ethnicity are significant determinants of women's employment in Kenya. While personal experience of female genital mutilation is insignificant, spousal age and education differences, as well as marital status (which reflect attitudes both in women's natal and marital families), are significant determinants of women's employment choices.     

The Care Economy in Post-Reform China: Feminist Research on Unpaid and Paid Work and Well-Being

ABSTRACT

As China embarked on the path of economic and social reforms, social provisions from the Maoist era were dismantled, and care responsibilities shifted back from the state to the household. Rural–urban migration, a steep decline in fertility, and increasing longevity have led to changes in the age structure of the population both overall and by region. Using seven different surveys, the eleven contributions in this volume study the distributive consequences of post-reform care policies and the impact of unpaid care responsibilities on women’s and men’s opportunities and gender inequality. Overall, reduced care services have created care deficits for disadvantaged groups, including low-income rural elderly and children. The shifted care burden has also limited women’s ability to participate fully in the market economy and has contributed to rising gender inequalities in labor force participation, off-farm employment, earnings, pensions, and mental health outcomes.     

Smartphone use,off-farm employment,and women's decision-making power: Evidence from rural China

Empowering women is an important goal of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, and studies have proposed various strategies to achieve this goal. However, few have examined the role of smartphone use in empowering women in decision-making and its mechanism. Therefore, this study analyzes how smartphone use affects women's decision-making power and explores whether this influence is due to women's off-farm employment mechanisms. For this purpose, the study uses the survey data of 1110 households in rural China and the endogenous treatment regression model for analysis. The control function approach addresses the selection bias of off-farm employment. The results show that smartphone use significantly increases women's decision-making power, partially channeled through increasing women's off-farm employment. The mechanism effect is robust to using both binary and intensive measurements of off-farm employment. Therefore, a policy to improve access to internet facilities and smartphone use could improve women's decision-making power through employment in the off-farm sector.     

The Gender Pension Gap in China

ABSTRACT

China has had a large gender gap in labor force participation, sectors of employment, and earnings. This study shows that disadvantages in the labor market for women are the primary drivers of the gender pension gap. Among people age 60 and older, women receive about half of the amount of men's social pensions. Using the 2013 wave of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) and the CHARLS Life History Survey of 2014, this contribution has three main findings. First, about three-quarters of the deficit in women's pensions is explained by women's lower likelihood of receiving occupational pensions, and one-third is due to smaller benefits when they do receive them. Second, the gender deficit in receiving an occupational pension can be explained by education level and employment sector. Third, among pension recipients, nearly one-third of the gender benefit gap is explained by women's fewer years of employment and lower salaries.     

Peace in the Household: Gender,Agency, and Villagers' Measures of Marital Quality in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

Although development studies have emphasized quality of life, the quality of marriage remains uninvestigated. This study challenges the bargaining model by arguing that theories of marital quality, derived from women's voices and subaltern knowledge, should be integral to feminist economic theories of marriage and intrahousehold gender relations. Findings from a longitudinal (1999–2009) ethnographic study of microcredit loanee families in rural Bangladesh reveal that Muslim women believe high marital quality or togetherness leads to peace in the household. This local model of marriage is central to the moral economy of social life. The study identifies eight local measures of marital quality that define what low-income women think a good Muslim husband should be like. The study concludes that the peace-in-the-household model emphasizes the transformation of masculinity as a program strategy that should be implemented in microcredit households in various parts of the world.     

The Influence of Patriarchal Norms,Institutions, and Household Composition on Women's Employment in Twenty-Eight Muslim-Majority Countries

ABSTRACT

The low level of women's employment in Muslim-majority countries is often explained by patriarchy, while disregarding variation among and within these countries. Using a new theoretical framework, this study translates patriarchy as a concept to macro- and micro-level explanations of employment. It formulates and tests hypotheses for societal norms and institutions and household composition, including how the latter's effects are context dependent. The study analyzes data from surveys (1997–2008) for twenty-eight countries, 383 districts, and 250,410 women and finds that men's public dominance over women decreases women's employment. Presence of – in particular non-foster – children and elderly people at home withholds women from labor market entrance. However, presence of other women in the household stimulates labor market entrance. Absence of a partner, male household head, or other adult men pushes women into the labor market, and thus, for example, male breadwinners' absence has a weaker negative effect in contexts of male public dominance.     

Does agricultural cooperative membership influence off-farm work decisions of farm couples?

Membership in agricultural cooperatives may influence intra-household decisions regarding the division of household labor. However, the linkages between cooperative membership and labor allocation remain unexplored. To fill this gap, we examine the impact of cooperative membership on off-farm work decisions of couples engaged in farming, using data collected from 595 banana farmers in China. The recursive bivariate probit model and endogenous-treatment Poisson regression model are employed to address the self-selection bias inherent in cooperative membership. The results show that cooperative membership increases the probability of participating in off-farm work by 38% for husbands and 31% for wives. Having large households reduces the probability of husbands but increases that of wives working off-farm. Cooperative membership is also associated with more time spent on off-farm work and higher earnings for both husbands and wives. Our findings point to the potential of agricultural cooperatives to increase farm couples’ off-farm employment, thus increasing household income and quality of life.     

Child Schooling and Work Decisions in India: The Role of Household and Regional Gender Equity

Abstract

This paper tests three hypotheses about how mothers' autonomy in India affects their children's participation in school and the labor market. To do so it extends the concept of mothers' autonomy beyond the household to include the constraints imposed by the extent of gender equity in the regions in which these women live. This study began with the expectation that increased autonomy for Indian mothers living in heterosexual households would increase child schooling and decrease child work. However, the results are mixed, indicating that mother's autonomy can be reinforced or constrained by the environment. The paper concludes that mothers and fathers in India make different decisions for girls vis-à-vis boys and that the variables reflecting mothers' autonomy vary in their impact, so that mothers' level of education relative to fathers' is not often statistically significant, while mothers' increased contributions to household expenditure decrease the probability of schooling and girls' work.     

Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities: A Critical Feminist and Postcolonial Analysis

ABSTRACT

This contribution seeks to delineate the broad contours of a transnational, anti-imperial feminist perspective on gender and economics in Muslim communities by bringing together feminist analyses of Orientalist tropes, development discourses and policies, and macro- and microeconomic trends. The goal is to facilitate conversations among scholars who have tended to work within their respective disciplinary and methodological silos despite shared interests. This approach pays special attention to intersectionality, historicity, and structural constraints by focusing on the diversity of the experiences of women and men by religion, location, citizenship, class, age, ethnicity, race, marital status, and other factors. It recognizes the complex relationships between the economic, political, cultural, and religious spheres and the role of local and transnational histories, economies, and politics in shaping people's lives. Finally, it emphasizes that openness to different methodological approaches can shed clearer light on the question of how various structural factors shape women's economic realities.     

The Impact of Transportation Infrastructure on Women's Employment in India

ABSTRACT

Indian women's labor force participation is extremely low, and women are much less likely than men to work in the nonfarm sector. Earlier research has explained women's labor supply by individual characteristics, social institutions, and cultural norms, but not enough attention has been paid to the labor market opportunity structure that constrains women's labor market activities. Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) in 2004–05 and 2011–12, this study examines how village transportation infrastructure affects women's and men's agricultural and nonagricultural employment. Results from fixed-effect analysis show that access by paved or unpaved roads and frequent bus services increase the odds of nonagricultural employment among men and women. The effect of road access on nonfarm employment (relative to not working) is stronger among women than among men. Improved transportation infrastructure has a stronger positive effect on women's nonfarm employment in communities with more egalitarian gender norms.     

Trade Liberalization and Gender Wage Inequality in Mexico

Abstract

After twenty years of trade liberalization in Mexico, the relationship between gender wage inequality and trade remains insufficiently studied, in spite of evidence of increasing numbers of women in industrial employment. This study aims to analyze the effects of export orientation and other characteristics that represent the industrial underpinnings of restructuring on gender wage inequality for 2001–5. There is consistent evidence of the negative impact of export orientation on men's and women's wages and the gender wage ratio, signifying that women lose in both absolute and relative terms. This result holds after controlling for women's share of employment and the skills of both genders, contrary to the expected effect from trade on equality. There is also a negative relation between a rise in the proportion of unskilled workers and the gender wage ratio, which suggests that the trade-induced skill hypothesis cannot be considered an adequate explanation for gender inequality.     

DOES CONTRACEPTION BENEFIT WOMEN? STRUCTURE,AGENCY, AND WELL-BEING IN RURAL MEXICO

The authors of this paper examine Amartya Sen's contributions to the concept of human well-being from a gender perspective and argue that this concept is particularly useful for explaining women's decisions on contraceptive use. The study draws on data collected in six rural communities of Chiapas, Mexico. It emphasizes the ways in which public discourse articulates the apparent benefits of having small families; the context of the household and community in which rural women make reproductive decisions; and the impact of family planning programs on women's sense of subjective well-being. In particular, it questions the assumption that reduced fertility through contraception necessarily enhances women's well-being and points to the importance that women attach to being a party to reproductive decisions. The authors also explore the links between women's assessment of these decisions and of paid work, and their actual education levels and real possibilities of employment.     

Working Time as Gendered Time

Household-labor time and market-labor time are organized in part through the social structure of unequal gender relations. Generally, women do more household work than men, women's market work is undervalued, and the greatest rewards for market work accrue to men. The career model of employment is biased in favor of men who have few household responsibilities. Even noncareer seniority-sensitive job paths assume male incumbency with limited competition from household responsibilities. In this article we discuss the gendered underpinnings of the organization of time in contemporary Western society by critically examining household-labor time and the masculine models of career and noncareer employment. In addition to the important feminist goal of pay equity, we argue for a feminist politics of time that promotes alternative work-time arrangements for women and men to foster gender equality in the market and at home.     

健康对非农就业及其工资决定的影响

利用 1 993年中国营养调查数据 ,本文探讨了中国农村地区健康对非农就业及其工资决定的影响 ,并试图从微观层面揭示中国农村地区健康与收入之间的关系。本文的主要发现是 ,对于劳动参与及非农就业机会 ,健康状况都有显著的影响 ;然而在传统的种植业领域 ,健康并不是劳动参与的决定性因素 ;同时 ,在农村的非农就业者中 ,健康并不是劳动力市场表现的重要因素。尽管如此 ,由于非农就业机会对家庭收入的重要作用 ,我们仍不难发现健康在获取非农就业收入乃至增加家庭收入方面的作用     

Moving toward markets? Labor allocation in rural China

China's economic reforms have brought rapid growth in rural off-farm employment, raising questions about the assumption that rural China is labor surplus and has poorly functioning factor markets. We investigate this by testing for separability between household labor demand and supply using panel data. We find that separability is rejected overall, indicating that factor markets remain underdeveloped. Nonseparability, however, is associated with labor surplus in some areas and labor shortage in others. Moreover, separability holds where substantial employment opportunities exist in the wider township, suggesting that such employment promotes competitive allocation within villages as well as the inter-village movement of resources.     

Caste,Kinship, and Life Course: Rethinking Women's Work and Agency in Rural South India

This paper reexamines the linkages between women's work, agency, and well-being based on a household survey and in-depth interviews conducted in rural Tamil Nadu in 2009 and questions the prioritization of workforce participation as a path to gender equality. It emphasizes the need to unpack the nature of work performed by and available to women and its social valuation, as well as women's agency, particularly its implications for decision making around financial and nonfinancial household resources in contexts of socioeconomic change. The effects of work participation on agency are mediated by factors like age and stage in the life cycle, reproductive success, and social location – especially of caste – from which women enter the workforce.     

Gender differences in self‐employment

This paper examines the factors that influence transitions into self‐employment, paying particular attention to gender differences. We find that: (i) men are more responsive to the wage differential between wage/salaried employment and self‐employment; (ii) liquidity constraints are more important for men; and (iii) the link between father's self‐employment status and the probability of self‐employment is stronger for men. Taken together, these results suggest that, for women, self‐employment is a closer substitute for part‐time work and labour‐market inactivity than it is for men. We attribute such differences to the different labour market opportunities and occupational strategies of women.     

Economic Citizenship: Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment

ABSTRACT

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the impact of the Child Support Grant (CSG) implemented in South Africa on the labor supply of the parents of beneficiary children. The aim is to assess whether the program improved or lessened gender inequality in the labor market. Using data from a national panel survey and applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity design that exploits an expansion in eligibility due to a discontinuous change in age eligibility, the results show that the CSG had a negative effect on the probability of parents of beneficiary children being employed and mixed effects on the participation in the labor force, with substantial heterogeneity by gender and by other individual and household characteristics. Overall, the evaluation suggests that the program provided support to members of vulnerable households in coping with the constraints of the South African labor market, but it did not reshape existing gender inequalities.     

Pro‐girl Bias in Intra‐household Allocation in the Rural Philippines: Revisiting the “Adult Goods” Approach

This paper detects pro‐girl (age 5–15) bias in intra‐household allocation of consumption budget in the rural Philippines using Deaton's “adult goods” method. Based on additional checks (including those for endogeneity), the results appear to be robust. The paper also finds that a larger share of girls among household members is positively associated with a larger budget share on transportation, suggesting that parents pay more for girls' transportation, possibly because of safety concerns. The results also suggest that, despite some earlier results in the literature, the adult goods method is capable of detecting gender bias, although alcohol and tobacco may not be suitable for detecting gender bias.