Incomplete transitions to clean household energy reinforce gender inequality by lowering women’s respiratory health and household labour productivity Poushali Maji a,⇑ , Zia Mehrabi a,b , Milind Kandlikar a,b a Institute for Resources Environment and Sustainability, The University of British Columbia, 2202 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, USA b School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, The University of British Columbia, 6476 N.W. Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, USA article info Article history: Accepted 17 November 2020 Keywords: Household energy transition Gender inequality Fuel-stacking Improved biomass cookstoves abstract India has over 800 million people without access to clean cooking fuel. A well-known, but under- researched aspect of poor access to clean energy is its cost on woman’s health and well being. Here we use the nationally representative India Human Development Survey, tracking the same set of house- holds from 2005 to 2011, to quantify the gender-related health and time-saving benefits of a shift in a household’s fuel and stove use patterns. We show that across India, the predicted probabilities of cough in non-smoking women are 30%-60% higher than non-smoking men in solid-fuel using households, but that a complete transition from solid fuels to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for cooking reduces this gap to only 3%. Exclusive use of LPG is also accompanied by reduced cooking time (~37 min) and less time for collecting fuels (~24 min) in rural households, together saving up to an hour in demands on women’s labour each day. We also find electrification reduces the probability of developing cough by about 35– 50% in non-smoking men and women across both rural and urban households, and help close the gap between men and women in rural households. Despite clean energy being a long-held policy goal of Indian governments, between 2005 and 2011, only 9% of households made a complete transition to clean energy, and 16.4% made a partial transition. We suggest that government efforts in India, and elsewhere, should focus on improving affordability, supply and reliability of clean fuels in enabling a complete household energy transition and help address key issues in gender inequality. Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In 2015, India had over 300 million people without access to electricity and over 800 million people without access to clean cooking fuel (Government of India, 2015), with the majority of this group residing in rural areas (Ailawadi & Bhattacharyya, 2006; Pachauri, 2014; Pachauri & Jiang, 2008). Total electrification and access to clean cooking LPG has been a long-held policy goal of suc- cessive Indian governments, though progress has been slow, par- ticularly in cooking energy transition. The ongoing transition in India from traditional solid fuels (such as wood fuel and dung) for cooking towards LPG has been faster in urban India and among middle and high-income households. The share of households rely- ing on LPG for cooking rose from 5% to 58% in urban India between 1987 and 2009 but only from 4% to 8% in rural India (Cheng & Urpelainen, 2014). Although there have been significant efforts towards electrification in recent years, with the Government of India claiming only about 19,000 un-electrified households as of 2019, 1 even when households have access to modern energy sources they often practice ‘fuel stacking’, wherein they continue to use bio- mass for cooking after adopting LPG, and/or kerosene lamps along with electricity (Davis, 1998; Kowsari & Zerriffi, 2011; Masera, Saatkamp, & Kammen, 2000; Pachauri & Spreng, 2003; Rajesh, Shukla, Kapshe, Garg, & Rana, 2003). This slow progress has both direct and indirect impacts on pro- longing gender inequality. Since women are responsible for cooking in most households, it might be expected that women are particu- larly more vulnerable to diseases caused by indoor air pollution from polluting biomass fuels (Bruce, Perez-Padilla, & Albalak, 2002; Gordon et al., 2014). In addition to adverse health impacts, clean energy transition can also have multiple impacts on reducing gender inequality, through improving women’s labour productivity https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105309 0305-750X/Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: p.maji@alumni.ubc.ca (P. Maji), zia.mehrabi@ubc.ca (Z. Mehrabi), mkandlikar@ires.ubc.ca (M. Kandlikar). 1 https://saubhagya.gov.in/ World Development 139 (2021) 105309 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect World Development journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev