Time Use and Life Satisfaction within Couples: A Gender Analysis for Belgium

AbstractThis article looks at the time allocation of individuals with a focus on paid and unpaid work, its division within households, and its link with life satisfaction. The study uses the cross-sectional MEqIN database for Belgium in 2016 and corrects for heterogeneity by using measures of the personality traits. The division of time appears to be quite gendered. Women are found to be more satisfied when working part time. This could be because a majority of working women still undertake most of the unpaid work so that they end up operating a double shift. Looking at the link of time allocation of both partners on the individuals’ life satisfaction, men’s behavior appears to be in accordance with a conservative gender attitude, and even a breadwinner version, while women’s behavior is closer to an egalitarian gender attitude. The study further observes that those behaviors are softened by the presence of children.HIGHLIGHTS In Belgium, women spend more time on unpaid work, even conditional on being employed.Without considering interdependencies, women are more satisfied when working part time.Accounting for interdependencies, women favor an equal sharing of paid and unpaid work.Men appear to be more satisfied when they undertake more paid work than their partner.Policy implications should involve changing men’s behavior and traditional gender norms.KEYWORDS: Time useunpaid workhousehold division of laborlife satisfactiongender analysisparenthoodJEL Codes: I31J22J16 ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThis article makes use of the MEqIn dataset, collected by a team of researchers from Université catholique de Louvain, KU Leuven, Université libre de Bruxelles, and University of Antwerp.SUPPLEMENTAL DATASupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2023.2251505https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2023.2251505.Notes1 Paid and unpaid work have been called differently before. For instance, sociologists often refer to care work when considering childcare activities and other types of care activities (England Citation2005). Within the feminist movement, this has been called as well productive and reproductive work (Vogel Citation2013). Note that the reproductive labor has been central in the International Wages for Housework Campaign in the 70s (Cox and Federici Citation1976). It was decided to keep using the naming unpaid work throughout this study as care work also comprises individuals who are getting paid for caring, such as nurses.2 Note that in Becker (Citation1993), Becker accommodates the fact that his predictions are at odds with the observation that both paid and unpaid work division are still very gendered by simply saying that women have a biologically-based comparative advantage over men in the household sector. Indeed, in his view, “the sharp sexual division of labor in all societies between the market and household sectors […] is also partly due to intrinsic differences between the sexes.”3 Note that productivity of the individuals has often been proxied by their wages in the economic literature. In this study, since we do not have any good measure of the individuals’ wages, we will sometimes simply look at their levels of education.4 Note that this is somehow an abuse of language as we don’t know whether the individuals chose not to be in paid employment.5 The time spent looking for a job is a variable unfortunately often missing in time use databases. This variable could be crucial in studies such as this one as, without it, unemployed individuals are seen as having a lot of time left (seen as positive for life satisfaction) while in fact they are looking for jobs (a stressful activity). Another activity seldom recorded in time use database is time spent volunteering. This activity could be interesting as well as for studies such as this one as it could be seen as a highly self-rewarding unpaid work activity.6 We, therefore, put together the Low and Middle values of the variable education as described in Table A1 in the Online Appendix.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO) [grant number BR/121/A5/MEQIN] (BRAIN MEqIn). We further acknowledge financial support from the Fond National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) through an Aspirant grant.Notes on contributorsBram De RockBram De Rock is Professor at the European Centre for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics (ECARES) at the Université libre de Bruxelles and the Department of Economics at KU Leuven. He is also an honorary senior research associate at University College London and an international research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (London). His research interests lie within family economics with a focus on consumption, labor supply, and the distribution of time and money within families.Guillaume PérilleuxGuillaume Périlleux is Affiliate Professor (Chargé de cours) in the Economics Department of the Faculté Warocqué d'Economie et de Gestion - UMONS. He holds a PhD in Economics from the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management at the Université libre de Bruxelles. His research interests lie within the domain of family economics, focusing on how families make decisions about labor division, consumption, and incurring debts.