Gendered pathways from side jobs to labor market resilience in farming households: Implications for sustainable agriculture

Abstract

The research question in this paper is to determine how household composition, gender, and sectoral paths of livelihood diversification determine working hours and the risk of underemployment within farming households in Indonesia. Using data from Sakernas August 2024, the research applies and estimates logit and OLS models with robust standard errors, with a focus on gender and elderly household member interactions. Three major results are obtained: (i) there is an ongoing gender difference in the probability of having a side job, but the existence of elderly representatives is a kind of time substitution that raises the rates of female participation; (ii) side jobs are related to an increase in the total number of working hours per week and a decrease in underemployment between populations, although the initial susceptibility of women is higher; (iii) the quality of the trajectories of diversification is more decisive than the presence of side jobs, with construction being a high-hours, low-underemployment trajectory, followed by trade and manufacturing. On the whole, the results indicate that the sectoral orientation of diversification is a primary factor in changing side jobs as a survival strategy into a source of labor market stability, with significant consequences for sustainable agriculture.