Does Outsourcing of Domestic Work Reduce Gender Inequality in Labor Force Participation within Households? - A Couple-Level Panel Analysis

Liat Raz-Yurovich , Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Assaf Tsachor-Shai, Pareto Consulting Group

The time devoted to unpaid work in the domestic sphere reduces time devoted to paid work and this time loss is higher for women than for men. The outsourcing of domestic work to service providers may serve as a mechanism to reduce the burden of unpaid work and to increase the labor force participation rates of men and women. This study takes a longitudinal couple-level approach and analyzes whether the likelihood of working and the number of work hours of male and female partners in households that employed a domestic worker increased after employing the domestic worker, and whether these changes translate into reduced gender inequality in labor force participation within households. Using an analytic sample of 85,282 married heterosexual non-Haredi Jewish couples aged 25-64 from the harmonized panel database of the Israeli Labor Force Survey for the years 2000-2017, and by employing an instrumental variable approach with Fixed-Effects Two-Stage Least Squares models, we find that outsourcing affects employment both at the extensive and at the intensive margins, but only among highly-educated women. The increase in highly-educated women’s weekly work hours is translated into a reduced gender gap in work hours, no matter their partner’s level of education.

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 Presented in Session 111. Labour Markets and Couples