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TIME POVERTY: CONCEPTUALIZATION, GENDER DIFFERENCES, AND POLICY SOLUTIONS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2024
Abstract
Individuals with heavy paid and unpaid work burdens may experience time deprivations that restrict their well-being and put them at risk of becoming or remaining income poor. Because unpaid work outside of the market is not captured in most large survey-based datasets, time poverty is rarely recognized in policy and practice. Yet income poverty and time poverty are mutually reinforcing; they can sap energy and impede effective decision-making, thus perpetuating the state of poverty. This essay offers a five-step approach to conceptualizing and measuring time poverty and it compares time poverty rates by gender across a range of developing countries. Results show that women have higher time poverty rates than men in most cases, with the main exception being countries with low rates of female labor force participation. Policies that strengthen physical and social infrastructure, thereby decreasing the time needed for unpaid household work, have demonstrable effects on reducing time poverty.
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- © 2024 Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation. Printed in the USA
Footnotes
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Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations, Rutgers University, yana.rodgers@rutgers.edu. Competing Interests: The author declares none. The author thanks Nika Deitch for their helpful research assistance and Ajit Zacharias for sharing the Levy Institute time-poverty data. I am indebted to Maria Floro, Naila Kabeer, Ebru Kongar, Tauhidur Rahman, David Schmidtz, Ajit Zacharias, and an anonymous Project Editor for their extremely useful suggestions and guidance on this essay.
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