Washing Machines, Gender Roles and Female Empowerment in Colombia

Despite the recent rapid growth in female labor market participation, poor households in developing countries exhibit a highly asymmetric distribution of household production efforts across genders. Moreover, the poorest of these households cannot afford purchasing labor-saving technologies such as laundry machines. As a result, females have substituted away from leisure, to accomodate their increased labor supply and limited reduction in household labor. We explore whether the limited extent of redistribution of home production efforts between men and women in these households is related to strongly held gender norms regarding home work, and the extent to which these shared beliefs can respond to the availability and experience with labor-saving home production technologies. With this purpose we undertake a pilot intervention where we randomly assign subsidized laundry machines to households in six very poor neighborhoods in Bogota, Colombia, and track changes in gender role perceptions, labor market outcomes, time allocation outcomes, child development and health outcomes, and women's health outcomes for these households and a set of neighboring control households. To account for the potential interferences across treated and control households within these neighborhoods we also randomize the intensity of treatment offer across neighborhoods.