Measuring Women's Empowerment: Gender and Time-use Agency in Benin, Malawi and Nigeria

"[W]omen's capacity to exercise time-use agency is conditional on gendered power dynamics and other barriers within households, which together are reciprocally related to local gender norms that dictate how women should spend their time."

Time use, or how women and men allocate their time, is an important element of empowerment processes. Target 5.4 of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 seeks to "recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and family", while Target 5.5 aims to "ensure women's full participation...at all levels". To integrate more fully the literature on time use and agency, this article proposes a new concept called time-use agency: an individual's confidence and ability to make and act upon strategic choices about how to allocate one's time. Using qualitative data collected with women and men engaged in on- and off-farm agricultural livelihoods in Benin, Malawi, and Nigeria, it examines normative expectations about women's and men's time use and their experiences of exercising agency (or not) over the use of their time. The aim is to explore time-use agency as a component of empowerment.

The article presents formative research to explore the salience, underlying components, and experiences of time-use agency gleaned from 92 semi-structured interviews conducted as part of three qualitative studies linked to gender-sensitive agricultural development projects in Benin, Malawi, and Nigeria. Among other things, these projects, which are detailed in the article, aimed to increase women's involvement in and earnings from market-focused agricultural activities, which may have increased demands on their time and shifted their roles within their households and communities.

The article organise the results following a socio-ecological model. First, it presents the context of opportunity and constraint, outlining normative expectations of men's and women's time use and the gendered nature of structural inequities in time poverty. In all three country contexts, most women and men described prevailing normative expectations about how men and women should spend their time. Such expectations for men centred around their role as the provider, decision maker, and protector of the household. For women, expectations centred on their role as unpaid caregivers responsible for domestic responsibilities. Many women across the sample shared experiences of disproportionate time burdens in fulfilling their expected roles and responsibilities, primarily in relation to household chores such as cleaning, childcare, and food preparation. Examples provided here highlight the higher value placed on the typically remunerative work to which men allocated time and the diminished social values placed on women's typically unpaid domestic labour and care work.

The analysis then explores time-use agency concepts, such as awareness of inequalities in control over men's and women's time use. For instance, a woman in Benin highlighted the potential consequences women who break norms face, inducing a level of fear she could lose her household (or security, children, etc.). This dynamic may prevent a woman from deviating from norms, reinforcing the notion that she does not have control over her time. In contrast, men are not similarly constrained. In all three study sites, several men and women shared examples of expressing their voice to convey concern or desire about how to spend their own time and feelings regarding how their spouses spent their time. In Benin and Malawi, this discussion centred around a woman attending an agricultural training programme. In general, women shared some control over deciding when and how to spend their time on normative and expected tasks and responsibilities, but men controlled the decision making on all tasks beyond such activities. Discussions of perceived conflict about time use are resolved by the husband's authority across all three countries and highlight various patterns of negotiation that women may employ to mitigate conflict or influence the result to achieve desired outcomes.

"These findings suggest that time-use agency is important for fully understanding empowerment with respect to time use. While time poverty often serves as a proxy indicator of one dimension of empowerment (or disempowerment), it does not elaborate on the extent to which one is able to choose and then to spend and manage one's time to achieve one's own goals. Understanding one's agency over one's time use, and how this agency may differ between men and women, points to the different barriers and opportunities that men and women may face to manage their time as a resource to reach their own strategic goals, thus enabling their empowerment..."

The authors note that the concept of time-use agency is not addressed in current women's empowerment metrics. Thus, a natural next step for this work is the development and validation of a survey instrument for measuring individual time-use agency. Such a measure would require a rigorous scale development and validation process but then could be incorporated into a greater variety of research designs.

In conclusion: "Development interventions should consider the gendered dynamics of time-use agency and address any barriers that women may face in controlling how they spend their time."