About This Project

The gender productivity gap is widespread and it entails severe implications for gender equality, especially in developing countries. Women's mental load, the management underlying household activities, is an important but neglected psychological aspect that risks widening this gap. This experiment wants to assess the impact of mental load on labor productivity in Kenya, controlling for attentional constraints as a leading mechanism.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

The gender productivity gap is particularly pronounced in developing countries, and it represents a major barrier for the achievement of gender equality and for women’s empowerment more broadly.

Despite evidence showing that lower cognitive abilities negatively affect labor productivity and earnings, little attention has been paid to the gendered dimension of the problem. Women risk being more disadvantaged than men because of mental load, the total sum of responsibilities related to the management of household activities.

The project will fill these gaps in the literature by analyzing the gender-differentiated impact of mental load on cognitive abilities and labor productivity in developing countries.

What is the significance of this project?

Mental load represents just the tip of the iceberg of the psychological dimension of gender (in)equality. While mental load risks entailing a series of negative effects, it is not the only psychological factor that can contribute to widening gender inequalities worldwide. For instance, women are more likely than men to suffer from depression, which can then affect economic outcomes such as labor supply and employment, or saving and investment decisions. Especially in developing countries, researchers do not pay sufficient attention to these psychological dimensions. This study will address this problem by causally identifying a possible psychological pathway that can have negative gendered economic impacts.

What are the goals of the project?

The main hypothesis of the study is that mental load can make it harder for women to focus on other factors than pressing daily needs and concerns about household management. Consequently, their attention, a limited cognitive resource, can decrease in the workplace, thus reducing their productivity.

To test this hypothesis I propose a lab-in-the-field experiment in which the participants in the treatment group will be exposed to a scenario inducing thoughts about household chores, and then they will be asked to perform an effort task.

If the results are confirmed, this would imply that women’s cognitive capacities and labor productivity may be negatively taxed by mental load, thus shedding light on an important but neglected dimension of gender inequality.