Last modified: 2017-12-22
Abstract
This paper aims to analyse the impact of married couples’ educational attainments on the working hour’s allocation among themselves in the household. This study contributes to the literature on women’s participation in employment, especially among married women, to see whether the traditional norms about gender roles in marriage still continue to shape the employment participation among married women in Indonesia despite of increasing women’s human capital through education. This study utilizes the Indonesian National Socioeconomic Survey (SUSENAS) 2016 and estimates the results using the multinomial logistic model. Our results show an evidence that, compared to low-educated couples, couples with more educated wives have a higher probability of having the wife works longer than the husband. However, this result is not as significant as the probability of the wife works longer hours than the husband when both husband and wife are highly educated and when the wife is less educated than the husband. Thus, it seems that it is not the education level of the wife per se that affects her probability to work longer, but it is the education level of her husband that may play a bigger role. Moreover, the traditional norms of a family notion also seems to still play a significant role in married women’s employment, particularly in regard to the number of children under-five and living in the rural area.