Wage Work for Women: The Menstrual Cycle and the Power of Water

Wage Work for Women: The Menstrual Cycle and the Power of Water We hypothesise that women’s participation in wage (off-farm) work is reduced when their greater water needs due to the menstrual cycle are not met because their household has poor access to water. For testing, we use the data from rural villages in China. Controlling for village fixed effects, poor access to water is found to decrease the probability of wage work participation of affected (pre-menopause) women by about 10 percentage points, a large effect. As expected, there is no adverse causal impact of poor household access to water for women post-menopause, or for men, ceteris paribus. NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY In this study, we investigate the impact of poor access to water on women’s wage work participation in rural China. This study hypothesises that women pre-menopause face higher costs of participation and achieve lower productivity when access to water is poor (holding other things equal), and therefore have lower rate of wage work participation. We use the China Health and Nutrition Survey dataset for 1993 to test the hypothesis. In this dataset, about half of the respondents do not have access to improved water, and also a large number of respondents are not involved in any type of wage work. Most importantly, there is specific information about women’s menopause status. We use both regression analysis and Propensity Score Matching methods to test the hypothesis. Both approaches yield supportive results. Women pre-menopause are found to be especially affected by poor access to water, that is, their probability of participating in wage work is about 10 percentage points lower than their peers with good access to water controlling for other confounding factors. For men, and for women post-menopause, poor access to water per se has no causal impact on wage work participation. Therefore, a major benefit of policies to improve water supplies may not be the obvious household or industrial benefit, but rather an unseen benefit, the improvement in the working position of women. While much of these benefits have already been gained in China which has made good progress in raising access to water, the results should be relevant to other areas of the developing world. JEL Classification: J16, J21, O15