Shifting hours: time allocation and gender inequality in India 1999–2019

Using two waves of Time Use Survey (1998-99 and 2019) from six states of India, we examine shifts in time allocation across leisure, employment, childcare, and domestic work. A Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition shows that the increase in leisure time and the decrease in employment time is driven more by changes in behavior within demographic groups than by changes in population composition. Women have also reduced time spent in domestic work, reallocating some of it to leisure. Applying the Juhn-Murphy-Pierce framework, we uncover contrasting distributional patterns: the inequality of leisure time, captured by the 90-10 percentile gap, has widened sharply, driven almost entirely by unobservable factors. Employment time inequality has increased among men but declined among women; inequality in domestic work has also narrowed for women. However, domestic work remains overwhelmingly the domain of women in both urban and rural areas, underscoring the persistence of gendered constraints in time allocation.