First to wake, last to eat: How India’s quest for gender parity begins on an unequal footing

Women are predominantly responsible for domestic work, the burden of which is typically heavier in the morning. Analysing data from India’s 2019 Time-Use Survey, this article shows that women tend to wake earlier and eat later than men, leading to reduced sleep, leisure, and social time – which worsens physical and mental health outcomes. These disparities persist across economic groups, remain largely unaffected by women’s paid work, and are exacerbated in more patriarchal districts.

Systematic gender differences in health and nutritional outcomes present longstanding challenges in India (Jayachandran 2023). For example, girls are routinely allocated a lower quantity and quality of food than boys (Aurino 2017, Jayachandran and Kuziemko 2011). Similarly, women often have access to the least nutritious parts of a meal (Lentz 2018). Social norms further reinforce these biases (Gittelsohn et al. 1997). Specifically, the widely prevalent custom of women eating after men (Desai and Vanneman 2005) adversely affects women’s physical and mental health outcomes (Coffey et al. 2018, Lentz et al. 2019).

Simultaneously, women also bear a disproportionate burden of domestic chores and care work. This burden is typically heavier in the mornings, when women are responsible for getting children ready for school and attending to the varied needs of other family members (Maume et al. 2010). To manage these responsibilities, women may need to wake up earlier, be physically active for longer, and have their first meal of the day later than other household members. The current discourse does not account for these intra-day differences and their implications. For example, the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) asks: “When your family takes the main meal, do women usually eat with the men?” These differences are important to explore as they reveal new dimensions of disadvantages that shape women’s well-being.

Investigating within-day sleep and mealtime inequalities

My research is based on the representative Indian Time Use Survey (ITUS) round from 2019, which uses a 24-hour recall to collect detailed time-use information across 165 potential activities in 30-minute blocks for household members six years or above. I focus on outcomes of working- age women and men (15-59 years) in households where both are present (Rathore 2025).

Preliminary analysis shows that differences in sleep and mealtimes are concentrated in mornings rather than nights, whereby most women wake up earlier but have their first meal of the day later than men (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Sleep and mealtime outcomes by gender

(a) Wake-up time from 12 am (b) Time of first meal

Notes: (i) ‘Whiskers’ denote the minimum and maximum values after removing outliers. (ii) Start of the horizontal box is the first quartile (Q1), which covers 25% of the group of interest in ascending order of the outcome. (iii) The yellow band represents the median (Q2), and the end of the box is the third quartile (Q3). (iv) In the first figure, Q2 and Q3 overlap for women as 33% of them report waking up at 6 AM.

Disaggregating morning outcomes by levels of economic well-being (consumption quartiles) in Table 1, I find that, as their economic conditions improve, both women and men wake up later and have their first meal earlier. The differences in gender burden and limits of economic progress are made evident by the fact that the average woman in the most economically well-off quartile (Q4) wakes earlier and eats later than the average man in the least well-off quartile (Q1). Gender differences across all consumption quartiles show that women are around 34-37 percentage points (p.p.) more likely than men to be the first ones to wake up. Similarly, they are around 16-21 p.p. more likely to be the last ones to eat their morning meal.¹

Table 1. Distribution of morning outcomes by economic well-being

Note: Sum of percentages by gender exceeds 100 due to ties whereby both women and men who wake up simultaneously in a household are the first to wake up. For meals, this total can be below 100 when other members (children or elderly) are the last members to eat.

Women are the last to eat and first to wake in India

I control for a range of household- and individual-level confounding influences, including time of other major meals and total sleep duration in the day. These factors are important to consider as women may compensate for delayed morning meals by eating later the previous night or nap at another time of the day when waking up earlier. Even after accounting for these and other possibilities, women are around 15 p.p. more likely than men to be the last to eat in the morning. Inequalities in the time of last meal taken are lower at around 3 p.p., and are further exacerbated by a higher sleep penalty. Women are also around 31 p.p. more likely to be the earliest to wake up relative to men. At night, they are around 2 p.p. less likely to be the first to sleep.

Although the ITUS does not collect information on health outcomes directly, I explore the relationship of these morning differences and women’s welfare indicators that are tied to various health outcomes. I find that women who are the first to wake up and last to have a morning meal spend significantly less time on sleep, socialising, and leisure – all of which are associated with worse physical and mental health outcomes (Caldwell 2005, Novotney 2019, Theorell-Haglöw et al. 2020).

One may argue that these outcomes could result from participatory household-level decision-making based on mutually agreed economic roles. For example, men’s higher participation in paid work and rigid workplace schedules may lead them to have their first meal earlier than women. My results, however, indicate that men’s lower flexibility in time use does not impact the sleep and mealtime penalties faced by women. These inequalities remain high even when women are in paid work and less flexible with their time allocation, irrespective of their spouse’s work status.

Disaggregating the results by caste shows that women in Scheduled Tribes experience significantly smaller morning sleep and mealtime penalties, reflecting their relatively egalitarian gender norms. In contrast to upper caste Hindu women, Scheduled Tribe women play a more integral role in economic and socio-cultural activities within the family and community, and face lower levels of discrimination (Mitra 2008). This highlights how economic progress alone cannot counter these inequalities (Rathore and Das 2022).

To further examine the role of social norms, I map the ITUS data to the representative Demographic and Health Survey (DHS-4) data for India. Following Singh et al. (2022), I construct a district-level composite measure of patriarchy across five domains. These domains include male domination over women, generational hierarchy, patrilocality, son preference, and socioeconomic domination. Unsurprisingly, I find that the morning sleep and mealtime inequalities against women are significantly worse in more patriarchal districts.

Policy implications for gender equality

These findings point to significant policy recommendations:

Facilitating access to labour-saving technologies with gender- sensitive design can reduce the burden of domestic work on women (Vemireddy and Choudhary 2021).
Substantial public investment in childcare and eldercare services is necessary to shift the burden of care work from an individual woman to collective society (UN Women , 2016).
Tackling entrenched gender roles requires structural change. For example, textbooks depicting men participating in chores and care work has shown promise in Kerala.

This article first appeared on VoxDev.

Note:

The difference between percentage points (pp.) and percentages (%) here are important. For example, for first to wake up in Q1, the difference between women (73.7%) and men (36.8%) is 36.9 p.p. or 100.3%. Thus, women are twice as likely as men to be the first to wake up.