REGULAR ARTICLE
Temporary migrants and gender housework
division among left-behind household members
Tien Manh Vu
Faculty of Global Management, Chuo
University, Hachioji, Tokyo, Japan
Correspondence
Tien Manh Vu, Faculty of Global
Management, Chuo University, 742-1
Higashinakano, Hachioji, Tokyo
192-0393, Japan.
Email: mvu264@g.chuo-u.ac.jp
Funding information
Asian Growth Research Institute; Chuo
University; Japan Society for the
Promotion of Science, Grant/Award
Numbers: 18K12784, 21K01455
Abstract
We examine whether Vietnamese migrant workers
induce a shift in gender roles in housework division
among the household members left behind. Using two
waves of the Vietnamese Household Living Standard
Survey (2006–2008), we apply the first-difference
method and estimate a simple household fixed effects
model with instrumental variables for robustness
checking. We find that temporary female migrants are
associated with a higher probability of undertaking
housework by male members left behind and there is a
reduction in the gender gap in terms of time spent on
chores. However, we find little evidence for a similar
reduction in the gender gap when the household size is
altered for other reasons.
KEYWORDS
gender, housework, housework division, migration, Vietnam
JEL CLASSIFICATION
J16, D13, O15
1|INTRODUCTION
The change in the welfare of members of a household, when another member migrates for
economic reasons, is an important research theme in developing countries. Although remit-
tances from migrants contribute to household income, the absence of these migrants can have
negative impacts on the people in their household that they left behind, particularly from the
perspective of gender issues. For example, in China, when the migrants are male, the women
left behind do more farm work (Mu & van de Walle, 2011), while children and the elderly do
more farm work and domestic work (Chang et al., 2011).
Received: 31 July 2019 Revised: 15 April 2023 Accepted: 5 May 2023
DOI: 10.1111/rode.13009
1834 © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Rev Dev Econ. 2023;27:1834–1854.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/rode
In cases where the migrants are female, however, it is not clear whether the left-behind
members of the household achieve some measure of gender equality in terms of domestic work.
When a female member of the household leaves, the left-behind males may have to take over
the household chores. Alvarez and Miles-Touya (2019) find that men adjust their chore contri-
bution equally by gender on their nonworking days. In Australia, when women are promoted
and earn more income, they have greater bargaining power within the family, which leads to
adjustments in the allocation of time spent doing housework (Foster & Stratton, 2018). How-
ever, female migrants are not present and thus cannot bargain to adjust the division of house-
hold chores by gender.
Vietnam is a suitable case for seeking answers to the question of whether the left-behind
members of the household achieve some measure of gender equality in terms of domestic work.
Between 2000 and 2010, economic structural changes and free trade arguably created the
greatest number of job opportunities for Vietnamese people far away from their hometowns.
The proportion of workers in agriculture, aquaculture, and forestry among total salary workers
decreased from about 9% in 2002 to (less than) 3% in 2006 (2010) 1(Vu & Yamada, 2018). The
bilateral trade agreement with the United States (BTA US-VN) went into effect in 2002 and,
more importantly, access to the World Trade Organization in early 2007 boosted growth in the
Vietnamese private sector. The BTA US-VN has increased the number of workers in the
manufacturing sector by 5% overall, and this increase is even larger for younger cohorts
(McCaig & Pavcnik, 2018). Vu and Yamada (2018) report that the private sector, including
foreign-owned enterprises (FOEs), surpassed state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in terms of
employment in 2005. As wages have increased, Vietnamese people have had a greater incentive
to leave their hometowns to seek jobs in other provinces and large cities. According to our cal-
culations based on the 2008 Vietnamese Household Living Standard Survey (VHLSS), 10.9% of
households reported at least one member who migrated for work, and half of these (50.7%) had
at least one female migrant.
Our descriptive statistics from Vietnam also show some preliminary evidence regarding the
differences between households with women who migrated for work sometime after 2006 and
other households with women who left for other reasons. As shown in Table 1, the two groups
had very similar characteristics in 2006, according to two-sample t-tests and two-sample
Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests for equality of distribution functions. In 2008, while all left-behind
females performed housework for the same number of hours, left-behind males in households
with temporary migrant (TM) females increased the number of hours spent doing housework.
In contrast, the left-behind males of the other group kept doing housework for the same num-
ber of hours. These findings suggest a more in-depth investigation of the issue of gender house-
work division is warranted.
Our study aims to examine this gender gap in housework division among family members
left behind when another member temporarily migrates for work, using household surveys con-
ducted in Vietnam in 2006 and 2008. We consider the following three questions. First, we ask
whether the division of labor in terms of housework among family members is altered after a
decrease/increase in household size, especially in the absence of females. Second, we ask
whether female migration for work is associated with a change in the average gender gap in
housework division among the household members left behind. Third, we ask whether consid-
ering temporary work migration against other more traditional reasons for household size
yields different results in terms of the gender gap.
More specifically, we use individual fixed effects with robust household clustered variance
to regress the linear probability of undertaking an hour of housework against the reasons for
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