Measuring social norms in unpaid care work in Tanzania

Context

Globally, women spend 2.6 times more on unpaid care work than their male counterparts (United Nations, 2020). In Tanzania, the gap is even wider. Women spend on average four hours each day on childcare, cleaning, cooking, fetching water, and caring for the elderly. Men, by contrast, spend just one hour per day on these tasks (UN Women, 2023).

CARE’s Farmer Field and Business School (FFBS) is designed to help farmers increase income, improve yields, and enhance nutrition. It also aims to empower women to take equal roles in agriculture. In the Iringa region, CARE trains farmers in climate-resilient agriculture, entrepreneurship, market access, and empowerment. Although the curriculum address transforming roles in agriculture, it doesn’t focus on women’s unpaid care work.

With funding from IDRC and Global Affairs Canada’s Scaling Care Innovations in Africa initiative, Laterite partnered with CARE. Together, we tested whether adding unpaid care work modules to FFBS could redistribute household tasks, shift social norms, and reduce women’s unpaid care burden.

Our research approach

We conducted a clustered Randomized Control Trial using a household survey. The study assessed how CARE’s intervention affects the distribution of care work. We surveyed 1,892 spouses from 946 dual-adult households, plus 240 women from 240 female-headed households.

Our goal was to measure complex ideas like social norms and roles assigned to women and men. These can’t be captured by a single question. Instead, we used validated indexes adapted to the project’s context.

But how do you measure complex constructs surrounding social norms?

Household roles: what the community thinks men and women should do

First, we aimed to measure the social norms related to household roles assigned to women and men. For this, we deployed a validated scale tested in the Democratic Republic of Congo designed to understand how much the community believes men should share in household responsibilities. Example questions included:

• Community norms: “Most newly married couples in my community approve of the husband sharing household work“
• Influence of important figures: “People whose opinions are important to me approve of the husband sharing household work“
• Partner beliefs: “My partner thinks we should both share the responsibilities of childcare”
• Community leadership: “Leaders in my community think my partner and I should both share in the responsibility of childcare“

The responses to these questions were scored on a four-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 “Strongly agree” to 4 “Strongly disagree.”

For our analysis, we adopted all 8 items to focus on the general community rather than religious communities (e.g. ‘congregation’ was replaced with ‘community’ and used reverse coding so that lower numeric values indicated lower perceived support for shared responsibilities.

Sharing unpaid care work: social pressure or personal belief?

Next, we wanted to understand what motivates individuals to take on unpaid care work. For this we used the Relative Autonomy Index (RAI), previously tested using nationally representative data from the Republic of Chad. This tool provides a validated approach to whether motivation is external, introjected, or autonomous. In simple terms: do people help out because of peer pressure, to avoid disapproval or simply because they want to?

We asked if people do chores:

For external reasons (expecting rewards or consequences):

• “Because I will get in trouble if I don’t”
• “Because I get a reward or benefit if I do”
• “So that others won’t get mad at me”

For introjected reasons (a desire to please others):

• “So that others don’t think poorly of me”
• “To please others”
• “Because I want people to like me”

For autonomous reasons (self motivations)

• “Because I personally think it is the right thing to do, whether or not others agree”
• “Because I enjoy it”
• “Because I think it is important for me, personally”

For our analysis, we simplified the standard RAI to focus on these nine motivations across three sets of activities (household chores, household purchases, and paid work). The standard scoring for an RAI leads to a more negative value for external or introjected motivations and a more positive value for autonomous motivation.

Outcome

Our baseline findings reveal that on average, both men and women perceive that others in their community expects men to share in household chores and childcare responsibilities. In fact, men are more likely than women to report that their community holds this belief.

We also observed average negative RAI scores for both men and women. This suggests that respondents were more motivated by social norms than personal choice. However, men reported lower RAIs than women. This means that men are more motivated to participate in household chores due to social pressure than a personal desire to support.

These insights suggest that, when designing the new care work modules, it’s more important to focus on shifting men’s internal beliefs about their household roles than on shifting norms at the community level.

This case study was written by Ester Diarz, Research Analyst at Laterite Tanzania. The views herein do not necessarily represent those of IDRC or its Board of Governors.