The Value of a Bangladeshi Woman’s Time: An Econometric Analysis

Salma Begum and Syed Yusuf Saadat

The unpaid labor of women in any country holds substantial economic value. This research aims to estimate the value of time for non-working women in Bangladesh, and the wage rates that they would face in the labourmarket. In this quest, it generates the probability that a woman works, her shadow wage, and her offered wage from a set of common parameters. This paper adopts the approach utilized in Heckman (1974, 1976, and 1979) and applies it in the context of Bangladesh by utilizing cross sectional data that was collected as part of the Bangladesh Quarterly Labor Force Survey 2015. There has been no research on estimating the value of non-working women’s time in Bangladesh using the econometric methodology that has been used in this paper. This study aims to fill in this research gap by conducting a systematic investigation on the unpaid labor of women in Bangladesh. The results of this study show that there is a negative and statistically significant relationship between the number of children and a woman’s probability of working. A woman’soffered wageis found to have a positive and statistically significant relationship with her years of schooling. The findings of this study provide hard evidence of the economic contribution of women in Bangladesh. The recognition that the unpaid labor of women has economic value is the stepping stone towards greater female empowerment.