E-commerce development, time allocation and the gender division of labour: evidence from rural China

ABSTRACTE-commerce is critical to rural women’s career development. From the perspective of labour supply, this study investigates the impact of e-commerce development in rural areas on individuals’ time allocation and households’ gender labour division. Based on the quasi-natural experiment of the Rural E‐Commerce Demonstration County Program in China, we use the data of a large-scale survey from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), and construct a difference-in-difference model to obtain the policy impact. Empirical evidence shows that e-commerce development promotes rural women’s part-time employment by crowding out their leisure time, while has no impact on the time allocation of rural men. Besides, e-commerce development fails to increase women’s entrepreneurship or modify the traditional gender division of labour in the household. The results demonstrate the benefits and shortcomings of e-commerce for rural women empowerment from a new perspective, indicating that more favourable policies should be introduced to support women’s digital skill improvement and entrepreneurial activities.KEYWORDS: E-commercewomen empowermenttime allocationgender labour divisionrural developmentJEL CLASSIFICATION: D1L51Q12J16 Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Data collected from ‘Digital Economy and Chinese Women’s Employment and Entrepreneurship Report’ published by The Ali Institute in March 2022.2 The county predetermined characteristics variables include whether it is a state poverty county, an old revolutionary area, or a provincial capital, total amount of post and telecommunications services (in billion yuan), cell phone subscribers and Internet broadband access subscribers (in ten thousands) in 2012.3 1369 individuals are treated in 2015, 1770 individuals are treated in 2016, 702 households are treated in 2017 and 1464 households are treated in 2018.4 Main Occupation Time is calculated from the weekly hours of work in the individual’s main occupation in the past 12 months from the CFPS questionnaire; Part-time Jobs is calculated by summing all weekly hours spent on the part-time occupation up to the time of the visit; Housework Time is calculated by summing housework time during weekdays and weekends; Leisure Time is calculated by summing the time spent on exercise, recreation, and Internet use during weekdays. The above variables are expressed in hours per week.Additional informationFundingThis study is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, the Research Funds of Renmin University of China (21XNH066)