Maternal employment and under Five Child Nutrition in Indonesia: beyond the standard Measure of employment

The theoretical notion of a household trade-off if a mother works still becomes a topic of debate, mainly driven by the traditional social norms of women's roles. On the one hand, employed mothers benefit children's development through monetary investment (MIE) and bargaining power effects (FBE). On the other hand, they reduce the total time allocation for childcare (TAE) which may harm children's development. The relationship between maternal employment and children's outcomes, therefore, remains questionable. This study aims to investigate the impact of maternal employment on under five (U5) children's nutrition, which is measured by height-for-age (HA) and stunting status, in Indonesia. Previous studies in Indonesia have been dominated by using the standard measure of employment (working and non-working), which is limited to illustrating the underlying mechanisms to validate the trade-off hypothesis. Motivated by this gap, this study examined six proxies of maternal employment: employment status, time of initial employment, four types of employment, labour incomes, working hours, and relative income to total family labour income as a proxy for bargaining power—all of the variables being extracted from the Indonesia Life and Family Survey (IFLS) 4 and 5 datasets. We adopted two econometric methods, the Linear Probability Model (LPM) for the child's HA and marginal effects from Logistic Regression (Logit) estimation for the child's stunting status, by controlling a wide range of individual and household characteristics, including potential confounding factors. In general, the estimate provided in the thesis shows that the positive effect of maternal employment status on a child's HA could not capture the adverse effects on a child's HA and stunting status when mothers spent very short or long working hours. We also found maternal employment benefits on child nutrition indicators via MIE, FBE, and participation in 'low-tier' formal workers. All in all, this study highlighted the existence of a trade-off hypothesis in Indonesia under specific circumstances.