Exploring gendered experiences of time-use agency in Benin, Malawi, and Nigeria as a new concept to measure women’s empowerment

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cg.authorship.typesCGIAR single centreen
cg.contributor.affiliationInternational Food Policy Research Instituteen
cg.contributor.crpAgriculture for Nutrition and Health
cg.contributor.donorInternational Fund for Agricultural Developmenten
cg.contributor.donorDeutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeiten
cg.contributor.donorBill & Melinda Gates Foundationen
cg.contributor.donorAfrican Union Development Agency-New Partnership for Africa’s Developmenten
cg.coverage.countryBenin
cg.coverage.countryMalawi
cg.coverage.countryNigeria
cg.coverage.iso3166-alpha2BJ
cg.coverage.iso3166-alpha2MW
cg.coverage.iso3166-alpha2NG
cg.coverage.regionWestern Africa
cg.coverage.regionSub-Saharan Africa
cg.coverage.regionAfrica
cg.coverage.regionSouthern Africa
cg.coverage.regionEastern Africa
cg.creator.identifierJessica Heckert: 0000-0002-3022-8298
cg.creator.identifierEmily Camille Myers: 0000-0003-3599-5856
cg.creator.identifierGreg Seymour: 0000-0002-2213-0450
cg.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.134275en
cg.identifier.projectIFPRI - Environment and Production Technology Division
cg.identifier.projectIFPRI - Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division
cg.identifier.projectIFPRI - Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project (GAAP)
cg.identifier.publicationRankNot ranked
cg.number2003en
cg.placeWashington, DCen
cg.reviewStatusInternal Reviewen
dc.contributor.authorEissler, Sarahen
dc.contributor.authorHeckert, Jessicaen
dc.contributor.authorMyers, Emilyen
dc.contributor.authorSeymour, Gregen
dc.contributor.authorSinharoy, Sheelaen
dc.contributor.authorYount, Kathryn M.en
dc.date.accessioned2024-05-22T12:13:46Zen
dc.date.available2024-05-22T12:13:46Zen
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10568/143387
dc.titleExploring gendered experiences of time-use agency in Benin, Malawi, and Nigeria as a new concept to measure women’s empowermenten
dcterms.abstractTime use, or how women and men allocate their time, is an important aspect of empowerment. To build on this area of study, we propose and explore the concept of time-use agency in this paper, which shifts the focus from the amount of time spent on activities to the strategic choices that are made regarding how to allocate time. We draw on 92 interviews from qualitative studies in Benin, Malawi, and Nigeria to explore across contexts the salience of time-use agency as a component of women’s empowerment. Our results indicate that time-use agency is salient among both women and men and dictates how women and men are able to make and act upon strategic decisions related how they allocate their time. Our findings suggest that time-use agency is important for fully understanding empowerment with respect to time use. Importantly, this study highlights the gendered dynamics and barriers women face in exercising their time-use agency. These barriers are tied to and conditioned by social norms dictating how women should spend their time. Women often make tradeoffs throughout any given day with respect to their time, balancing their expected priorities with the barriers or limitations they face in being able to spend any additional time on tasks or activities that further their own strategic goals. Additionally, these results on time-use agency echo similar themes in the literature on gendered divisions of labor, time poverty, and decision-making, but also add new subtleties to this work. For example, we find that women can easily adjust their schedules but must carefully navigate relationships with husbands to be able to attend trainings or take on new income generating activities, results that align with previous findings that women consistently have higher involvement in small decisions compared to large ones. While these themes have been observed previously in studies of women’s empowerment, to our knowledge, our study is the first to connect them to time use and time-use agency. Our study contributes the conceptualization of time-use agency, and the identification of themes relevant to time-use agency, through the emic perspectives of women and men across three diverse settings in Sub-Saharan Africa. As a concept, time-use agency goes beyond measuring time use to understand the gendered dynamics around controlling one’s time use to advance their own strategic goals and highlights any barriers one faces in doing so. It is a particularly relevant concept for interventions that aim to increase (or at least, not diminish) women’s empowerment by promoting women’s involvement in remunerated activities. Although time-use agency, as a concept, has yet to be addressed in women’s empowerment literature. A next step in this area of inquiry is to develop survey indicators on time-use agency, which may reduce bias and cognitively burden compared to existing time use surveys.en
dcterms.accessRightsOpen Access
dcterms.bibliographicCitationEissler, Sarah; Heckert, Jessica; Myers, Emily; Seymour, Gregory; Sinharoy, Sheela; and Yount, Kathryn M. 2021. Exploring gendered experiences of time-use agency in Benin, Malawi, and Nigeria as a new concept to measure women’s empowerment. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2003. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.134275.en
dcterms.extent38 p.en
dcterms.isPartOfIFPRI Discussion Paperen
dcterms.issued2021-02-01
dcterms.languageen
dcterms.publisherInternational Food Policy Research Instituteen
dcterms.relationhttps://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12725en
dcterms.replaceshttps://ebrary.ifpri.org/digital/collection/p15738coll2/id/134275en
dcterms.subjectgenderen
dcterms.subjectwomen's empowermenten
dcterms.subjectagenciesen
dcterms.subjectcapacity developmenten
dcterms.subjectempowermenten
dcterms.subjectqualitative analysisen
dcterms.subjectpovertyen
dcterms.subjecttimeen
dcterms.subjecttime use patternsen
dcterms.subjectwomenen
dcterms.typeWorking Paper

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