Women's Employment Issues: Discussion

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This discussion consists of two parts: (a) a methodological perspective on the employment of women in agriculture obtained from the new home economics and (b) comments on the three papers presented here, papers which present different perspectives. The new home economics is an extension of neoclassical economics that provides a framework for modeling a wide range of decisions made by households in developing and developed countries. The basic idea underlying the new home economics is that households are not just consuming units but that they are productive, transforming inputs of human time and other resources into commodities that adult household members wish to consume, e.g., number of children, child quality or health, meals, etc. (Michael and Becker; Nerlove). The basic concept of the new home economics can be incorporated into a neoclassical model of decision making by agricultural households on farm and household inputs, including labor, and farm outputs. These households are assumed to have a single utility function (Nerlove; Becker, chap. 8). Households face three types of constraints. First, the household receives an endowment of time of each of its adult members (children are excluded as a simplification) which it considers allocating among own-farm work, off-farm work, housework, and leisure. The time of husbands and wives are treated as heterogenous because skill and biological differences are accounted for separately. Second, the household in general receives income from sale of farm output, off-farm wage work of its members, and nonfarm nonwage income and spends it on inputs for farm and household production (assuming no saving). Third, the properties of the farm-household production function constrain the efficiency of transforming inputs into consumption goods and outputs for sale. Environmental factors and technology affect the efficiency of production. Nonfamily hired labor and family labor are treated as separate inputs because of skill and reward differences. Farm households' choices of inputs and outputs are determined by household utility maximization subject to constraints on time, income, and production. The demand for husband's and wife's farm work, housework, and leisure; supply of their off-farm work; and demand for other inputs and supply of farm outputs are determined by prices of market inputs, prices of farm outputs, off-farm wage rates, nonwage-nonfarm income, and environmental and technological factors. These extended neoclassical models provide a rigorous framework for modeling household choices on women's hours of work outside the household. It suggests that these decisions are made jointly with other household decisions, including number of children. Given that husbands and wives are not identical in their work related skills, the model implies that households increase the size of their consumption set by having husbands and wives specialize in work activities according to their relative comparative advantage. The model is rich in suggesting variables to guide empirical studies of time allocation, but it generally provides few comparative static predictions that can be tested directly against empirical estimates. The model permits corner solutions where optimal hours of work are zero, and then provides a framework for analyzing the dichotomous participation decision. Empirical studies by Evenson and by Huffman and Lange have applied the methodology to estimate demand functions for women's farm labor for Philippine and U.S. farm women, respectively. These studies plus Rosenzweig's study for India report estimates of women's off-farm labor supply functions. These studies suggest that noninstitutional variables can successfully explain many of the differences in how women allocate their time across countries and over time. The Hart paper raises interesting issues about rice yields across two countries, Java and Bangladesh. Although she attributes most differences in growth of rice output to differThe author is a professor of economics, Iowa State University. Journal Paper No. J-1118 of the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station, Project 2314.