Reproducibility package for Moving Beyond Time Poverty: Measuring Women’s And Men’s Time-Use Agency

Economic research on time use has traditionally focused on the total time individuals spend across different activities. However, less is known about time-use agency, or the ability to make strategic choices on allocating one’s time. We present findings from a novel, representative time use study in Malawi, where men’s and women’s self-reported time use — collected continuously via a pictorial smartphone app — was complemented with a new interview-based time-use agency survey module to quantitatively measure their ability to flexibly reallocate their time. As measured in the time-use agency module, women were 20 percentage points more likely than men to report inflexibility on being able to adjust the timing of activities across agriculture, unpaid domestic work, transport, leisure and personal care. We also show that this inflexibility has a distinct and significant association with a range of employment and wellbeing outcomes, beyond overall time spent in paid and unpaid work.