Gendered Division of Domestic Work and Childcare in Albania and Serbia A Comparative Study of National Time Use Surveys

This thesis explores patterns of domestic work and childcare in Albania and Serbia. Particularly, it asks how education, marital status, employment, and parental status affect the time men and women in Albania and Serbia spend on domestic work and childcare. By looking at matched couples and their characteristics, it also asks how couples in Albania and Serbia share this labor. By employing 2010 national time use data from Albania and Serbia, the study reveals major gender differences in how unpaid work is handled in both countries. The results indicate that there is huge gender inequality in the domestic sphere in both Albania and Serbia; however, in this domain, Albania is much more traditional than Serbia. Albanian women do more unpaid work than Serbian women and Serbian men do more unpaid work than Albanian men. Education, marriage, parenthood, and employment have an impact on the time Albanian and Serbian women spend on unpaid work. For Albanian and Serbian men, however, the results are mixed. Education and marriage do not have an impact on the amount Albanian and Serbian men spend on domestic work and childcare. Parenthood and employment have a small effect on the amount of time both Albanian and Serbian men spend on these activities. Matched couples’ data show that Serbian husbands share more unpaid work and routine work, compared to Albanian husbands. Higher educational levels for women partners are associated with a decrease in unpaid work and routine work among couples in Serbia, but not in Albania. While a higher educational level helps Albanian women reduce the amount of their own time in unpaid work and routine work, it does not help them convince their partners to participate more in unpaid work or routine work. The study shows that macro-level gender inequality predicts more unpaid work for women and the burden of unpaid work seems to be among women with elementary educational levels, especially in Albania. It also shows that individual-level factors (such as higher educational attainment) are not enough to increase men’s contribution to domestic labor, in the presence of high macro-level gender inequality (in the case of Albania). However, educational attainment and employment are crucial in easing the burden of unpaid work for women. Even if their partners do not contribute more (in the case of Albania), employed women and women with tertiary levels of education find a way out of unpaid work, by either outsourcing it or by simply not doing it. In the presence of more egalitarian macro-level gender ideology, (in the case of Serbia) women’s individual characteristics (higher educational attainment) but not men’s elevate men’s contribution to unpaid work and routine work in the household. This study makes an academic contribution to the literature of domestic and childcare labor by bringing into the mainstream literature two countries rarely explored at this level. It also sets the background for further research on this area by comparing more Balkan countries (upon data availability) and by also comparing contrasting these countries to other countries worldwide.