Moving beyond Time Poverty: Measuring Women’s and Men’s Time-Use Agency

Thomas Daum, Talip Kilic, Gayatri Koolwal, Greg Seymour and Wilbert Drazi Vundru

No 11343, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Economic research on time use has traditionally focused on the total time individuals spend across different activities. However, less is known about time-use agency, or the ability to make strategic choices on allocating one’s time. This paper presents the findings from a novel, representative time-use study in Malawi, where men’s and women’s self-reported time use—collected continuously via a pictorial smartphone app—was complemented with a time-use agency survey module to quantitatively measure their ability to reallocate their time flexibly. The analysis reveals that women are 20 percentage points more likely than men to report inflexibility on being able to adjust the timing of activities across nearly all activity domains, including agriculture, unpaid domestic work, transport, leisure, and personal care. Women spend a significantly higher share of total daily time in the domains they report as non-flexible, while men are more likely to report non-flexibility in leisure on its own, or in combination with other daily activities. The share of non-flexible daily time is negatively associated with women’s desire for additional paid hours and their probability to look for work. Among women, intrahousehold differences (women’s minus men’s) in the share of non-flexible daily time are also associated with lower share of time in leisure, higher likelihood of being underweight, and weaker land rights. Overall, time-use flexibility (agency) captures a dimension of inequality that is empirically distinct from time poverty or total work burdens, with particularly strong relevance for women’s work and wellbeing.

Date: 2026-03-23
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