Gender features of time allocation, gender stereotypes and labour supply

Abstract

Securing the well-being, protection of human rights and equality on the ground of age, gender, race, nationality etc along with sustainable economic development becomes the most important goal for any country. Gender differences in labor market are a problem of many countries. Being a larger demographic group, women have played a vital role in employment and economic development. Despite longstanding striving for gender equality, the inequality manifests itself in labor markets around the world. There is no common opinion on the reasons of the existence of gender differences in economic literature. After decades of research most investigators would agree that there can be no single-factor explanation for gender inequality in the labor market. One of the conventional explanations of gender gap in employment sphere includes the differences in men's and women's preferences in working hours due their stereotypical roles in the private and public life. This paper is focused on the study of gender feature of time allocation and its impact on the labor supply by men and women. For this purpose, based on the different types of activity, particular: income getting or income increasing promote activity, non-monetary income obtain activity, income-make activity, non-income-make activity, indirect-receipts activity, the author introduces the time allocation model which includes parameters such as working time, leisure, non-working time, using time, free time and time for satisfying an individual's physiological needs. For the attribution of different types of practice to certain kinds of activity the " principle of dominant purpose of activity" was offered. According to given time allocation model, the pattern of features of labor supply by men and women is offered in the paper.