Making family caregiving work pay: a reassessment of bargaining power within the household

Abstract

Literature shows that bargaining power within the household explains consumption patterns, fertility decisions and time use.  Considering the gender differences in decision making power and recognising the importance of unpaid care work, in this paper we posit the following question: how much bargaining power would change if we were to value unpaid care? We focus on income shares within the household as the individual power measure for the household head and his or her partner. We value unpaid care work using two alternatives: opportunity and replacement costs and econometrically simulate the shift of power using a representative time-use survey for Colombia. We find that women’s power within the household is on average 31.4% lagging that of men by 18 percentage points. Considering that women leading the household are responsible for 58% of the time devoted to unpaid care, if we were to remunerate those activities we would find a complete reversal of roles: women’s power would be around 50% while men’s would be slightly below 30%. We recognise that making family caregiving work pay is close to impossible under the current social norms of modern economies, but the important gaps in income and bargaining power are worth to be studied further from a normative point of view.