Sustaining the Tradition in Multigeneration Families: Women’s Time Use and Unpaid Domestic Work in India

Abstract

In India, social prejudices against women are culturally entrenched, and women carry an unfair and disproportionate burden of unpaid work, often reduced to “unproductive labor”. Nuclear families are rapidly replacing multigenerational families, which could have a significant impact on women’s mobility and capacity to strike a balance between work and family life.

This article explores the time use pattern of working-age women in unpaid domestic work in multigenerational and multi-compositional households, shedding light on the intricate dynamics of household responsibilities and the potential implications on gender equality. This study uses data from the Time Use Survey (2019) of India, conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) from January – December 2019. Our study considers working-age women between 15 and 64 years and the sample size is 174,621. A negative binomial regression approach is used to explain the effect of explanatory factors on women’s time spent on unpaid domestic work and its family dynamics. Our findings reveal a significant gender disparity in unpaid work persisting across the lifespan. Specifically, married women bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid work compared to their unmarried counterparts. Higher education reduces the time spent by a working-age woman on unpaid domestic work. We find that women exhibit the most paradoxical traits, and the complex Indian social stratification contributes to a huge disparity in unpaid domestic work, with upper-caste Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh women putting in the most hours.

The presence of school-age children increases the amount of time women spend on unpaid domestic work. Women living in a nuclear family, on average, have higher levels of unpaid work compared to women living in multigenerational households. Unpaid domestic work of women reduces in female predominant households while increases in male predominant households. While natal parents are more supportive than in-laws, the education of parents and in-laws has a significant impact on unpaid domestic work. Our study has policy implications and discusses the conflicts working-age women could encounter between family and economic work.