Page 390 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 6

CPS1993 Asmae Mhmmoudi
The national level estimation of unpaid work shows a significant effect of
the place of residence on time spent by Moroccan couples on unpaid work.
Living in urban area decreases couple’s time devoted to unpaid work
compared to couple living in rural area. Nevertheless, its effect is more
important among women than men. This result is expected if we take into
account the greater availability of electricity, substitutable market goods and
services in urban areas.
Furthermore, the time devoted to unpaid work vary with the number of
children differently according to sex. Mother’s time spent on housework
increases significantly when children are in the household and inversely
related to their age. Regardless of the place of residence, the increase in
mother’s unpaid work is rather for mothers with children less than 2 years.
However, there is no significant effect of the presence of children on fathers’
share of unpaid work. A similar result was founded by Deding and Mette
Lauste (2006) for Danish couples.
The variables introduced initially to capture susceptible changes of social
norms have fewer effects on couple’s time devoted to unpaid work. Although,
the cohort effect is significant in each area of residence, coefficients are quite
small, indicating the persistence of traditional roles sharing in Moroccan
society.
Contrary to rural area, educational attainment of husband living in cities
matters significantly their time spent on housework and childcare. Indeed,
husbands with high education perform a higher share of housework and
childcare. This finding lead to the conclusion that a modern vision
characterized by a redistribution of roles more equally tends to be developed
for higher levels of educational attainment in urban areas However, education
of wives has no significant effect on their unpaid work time. Moreover, high
education level of wives doesn’t matter significantly time spent on unpaid
work of their husbands.
Inactivity and unemployment of the wife reduce unpaid work time of her
husband. Nevertheless this effect is only significant in urban areas where the
daily allocation of time spent in unpaid work decreases by about 11 minutes.
However, the performance of unemployed and inactive women living in cities
is more important compared to employed women. Moreover, employment
status of the husband doesn’t matter the unpaid work time of his wife only
when he is unemployed. The time spent doing unpaid work by wife fall by 56
minutes if her husband is unemployed. In turn, this reduction is offset by an
increase of his participation to unpaid work. Specifically, his time spent on
unpaid work increase by 42 minutes compared to employed men. A possible
explanation of this result is that the reduced market work of unemployed and
inactive individuals is made up by additional housework and childcare. This is
in line with Kitterød and Lyngstad (2005) who found that fathers who work

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