Do Educated Wives Work Longer Hours?: Analyzing the Effect of Educational Attainment on Working Hours among Married Couples in Indonesia

摘要

This paper aims to analyze the impact of married couples' educational level on the allocation of working hours in a 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 the increase in 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 offer evidence that, compared to low-educated couples, couples with more educated wives have a higher probability that the wife works longer than the husband. However, this result is not as significant as the probability that the wife works longer hours than the husband when both partners 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 that affects her probability to work longer; it is the education level of her husband that plays a bigger role. Moreover, the notion of traditional family norms also seems to still play a significant role in married women's employment, particularly when a family has children under the age of five or lives in a rural area.