The Contribution of Girls’ Longer Hours in Unpaid Work to Gender Gaps in Early Adult Employment: Evidence from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam

Abstract

Across many countries, girls perform more unpaid work than boys. This article shows how the time young women and girls spend in unpaid household work contributes to the gender pay gap that is already evident by age 22. The study analyzes employment participation, type of employment, and wages using five waves of the Young Lives longitudinal survey for Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. Spending longer hours in unpaid household work in adolescence positively predicts later employment participation but has a scarring effect in negatively predicting job quality (that is a job with a private or public organization) and hourly earnings, particularly for women. Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions of the gender wage gap show young women’s penalty for past household work is due to longer hours of such work rather than a higher penalty for women for a given amount of unpaid work.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.