Gender, Time Use and Family Roles: The Importance of Relative Resources and Time Availability

Changes in different aspects of family and its correspondence with widespread structural and ideational changes in Iran has been documented in previous research but no study to date has examined gender differences in family roles at the national level. This paper uses data from the 2014-2015 Time Use Survey, representing urban areas of Iran, and applies the relative resources and time availability approaches to describe the differences between wives and husbands in participation in the total unpaid household related activities across their family life course and explain such differences. The results suggest a clear male-bread winning and female home-making pattern, although wives and husbands allocated similar amount of time to either the community or individual activities. These gender differences include not only the time allocated to the family and household activities, but also their pattern and life course variations. In addition, the wives’ experience is more consistent with the predictions of the time availability and relative resources approaches than that of husbands. Adjusting for other factors does not remove the association between gender and participation in the family- and household-related activities, suggesting the predominance of gender values and norms over socio-economic and demographic factors examined in this paper.