Time Use and Gender Gap in Scholar Performance: An Analysis in Pandemic Context

This article aims to analyze the influence of time use in various activities (household chores, paid work, leisure, and private study) on the gender gap in the Literacy and Mathematics subjects of Brazilian students in 2021, a period in which we are experiencing the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite analyzing school performance in Portuguese, the article is focused on Mathematics, contributing to the scientific community with evidence that there is still a long way to achieve Objective 14.8 of the Plano Nacional de Educação, which seeks to increase the participation of women in professional careers that require a greater charge in exact sciences. The basic methodology is the Oaxaca-Blinder, which allows us to decompose the results and evaluate how the structural factor affects students' performance in the SAEB, related to how students allocate their time in the aforementioned activities. Our results indicate that the unobserved effort in the activity performed seems to influence more than the time applied, since the returns of the activities are more influential when the groups are comparable between themselves than the differences in endowments. In addition, it is concluded that the cultural factor is still the main obstacle to reducing the gender gap, where boys are encouraged to engage in paid work prematurely, while girls are encouraged to do domestic activities, and in both cases, the time allocated grows with the grade of students, indicating that accountability increases with age.