Women's work and agricultural productivity gaps in India

Most studies on gender gaps in agricultural productivity leverage within-household differences between plots managed by women and men. Such a gender-based division of plot management simplifies empirical tests for productivity differences, but it is not a common arrangement outside some locations in sub-Saharan Africa. In most rural households, women and men jointly participate in production, complicating the identification of gender-based productivity differences. This study proposes a broader empirical test of productivity gaps that applies to such systems and is rooted in gender-based inequities rather than gender per se. We explore productivity gaps in rice-cultivating Indian households, where women and men perform distinct cultivation tasks. We measure productivity gaps based on the differential use of family and hired female labor across households and then compare them with gaps based on the differential use of family and hired male labor. Using plot-level data, we identify significant gender-based productivity gaps after controlling for input use and plot- and household-level characteristics, along with using village fixed effects and machine learning estimators to address selection and model misspecification concerns. We find that households using family female labor have lower agricultural productivity than those also hiring female workers, such that forgone production value is greater than the cost of hiring women. We find suggestive evidence that this gap stems from skill differences between hired and family female workers. In contrast, we find no similar gap regarding male labor use. Overall, household welfare is lower because of gender-based inequities, and highlights the potential productivity implications of expanding women's labor choices in both on- and off-farm roles.