Policy Briefs
Time Use, Unpaid Care Work and Women’s Employment in Jordan
No.
PB 166
Publisher
ERF
Date
June, 2026
In a nutshell:
- A new time-use module in the JLMPS 2025 makes it possible to examine how women and men in Jordan allocate time between unpaid care work and employment-related activities.
- Nearly 79% of women aged 15–64 participate daily in unpaid care work, compared to 40% of men.
- Women of working age spend an average of 4 hours per day on unpaid care work, compared to only 1.1 hours for men, meaning that women devote approximately three and a half times more time to unpaid care than men.
- Marriage and family formation substantially intensify women’s care burden: married women spend roughly four times the amount of time spent by married men on unpaid care.
- For married working women, especially wage workers, the total amount of time spent in paid and unpaid work is higher than any of their male or female counterpart, highlighting the issue of the ‘double burden’, where working women are expected to juggle both their professional and care duties.
Authors
Marina Hesham
Assistant Lecturer of Economics, Faculty of Economics...