Everybody Works: Gender, Age and Economic Activity

Gretchen Donehower, University of California, Berkeley
Iván Mejía-Guevara, University of California, Berkeley

Much progress has been made in understanding the generational economy – how people produce, consume, share and save resources across age groups. A natural extension of this work is to add gender as a characteristic of interest. Using data from the United States in 2009, this paper presents the first systematic integration of gender into the study of economic activity by age. It includes not just the market economy represented in national income accounts, but also the household economy, estimated using time use and imputed wage data. The results indicate how much value is produced in the household and how gender roles persist in household and market production in the US today. This comprehensive view of the economic life cycle, including household production, shows us men’s and women’s total economic contributions and gives the true cost of inputs to dependents.