This study analyzes the impact of women’s decision-making power on the time spent on unpaid care work across genders, focusing on rural households in Bangladesh. Rural Bangladesh is characterized by the historical entrenchment of the dual burden of ...
This study analyzes the impact of women’s decision-making power on the time spent on unpaid care work across genders, focusing on rural households in Bangladesh. Rural Bangladesh is characterized by the historical entrenchment of the dual burden of productive and care work on women. This is driven by the specific nature of agricultural labor and religious customs that restrict women’s social mobility, thereby rendering their economic contributions invisible. In this context, economic participation alone is insufficient to trigger a redistribution of care work. This necessitates an examination of whether women’s decision-making power, reflecting actual intra-household bargaining power, can contribute to such redistribution. Accordingly, this study distinguishes between women’s general decision-making power over daily life and their decision-making power over agricultural production. It estimates the respective impacts of these two dimensions on unpaid care time for men and women and examines the effects across different types of care work.
The findings are as follows. First, the empowerment of women’s general decision-making significantly increased men’s total care work time by approximately 1 hour and 25 minutes per week, representing a 37% increase relative to men’s average care time. Second, decisions regarding visits to family and friends had the greatest impact on increasing men’s care work and reducing women’s care burden. This suggests that the expansion of women’s physical autonomy serves as a key mechanism for the redistribution of care work within the household. Third, while the strengthening of women’s general decision-making power showed a particularly large effect on men’s indirect care time, women’s care time did not decrease proportionately. This raises the possibility that men’s participation might not directly substitute for women’s labor. Fourth, women’s decision-making power over agricultural production had no overall significant impact on care time. This can be explained by two mechanisms. First, expanding women’s economic decision-making power without increasing physical autonomy may not create incentives for care redistribution. Second, weakened gender norms in the economic sphere may trigger compensatory reinforcement of traditional care roles.
This study distinguishes itself from existing research by elucidating the differing impacts of economic decision-making power and social decision-making power on care work. When designing policies to alleviate women’s care burden, it is necessary not only to strengthen their economic decision-making power but also implement policy interventions that encourage women’s participation in public activities and expand public care infrastructure.