Towards Gender Equality Newsletter Issue #4: Gendered beliefs, norms, and work

2024 is a year of elections the world over, and globally public debate reflects disagreements on facts but also differences in deep-seated beliefs about values, expectations, attitudes, and norms. 

Any study of gendered realities is as much an examination of what is occurring in the world, as it is an examination of what is happening in each individual’s mind. As social beings, we absorb our cues on gender – on what is appropriate or not, on what is possible or not – from the communities that raise us and from our influences and experiences over the course of our lives. 

Four of EGC’s postdoctoral associates are investigating this rich and relatively unexplored domain with sharp theoretical and analytical tools. We invite you to dive into their excellent research through the summaries and links below. 

Buchmann, Meyer & Sullivan [Working Paper]

This paper defines and tests for paternalistic discrimination, which is the differential treatment of two groups to protect one group, even against its will, from harmful or unpleasant situations. The authors examine this in the context of a night-shift (7pm to midnight) one-shift job in Bangladesh, where employers may tend to hire more men for the job because they may believe travelling home from work at night is unsafe for women. 

The authors conduct two experiments, one on the demand side with employers and one on the supply side with applicants. They use these experiments to estimate employers' (i) taste for working with men vs. women, (ii) preference for profits, and (iii) altruistic concerns for men vs. women (other-regarding utility). They then enter these parameters into an equilibrium model to estimate the impact of eliminating paternalistic discrimination on the gender employment gap and the gender pay gap.

In the demand-side experiment with employers, the authors vary the perceived safety of a night-shift job to test whether labor demand for women decreases as perceived job costs to female workers increase. 495 employers make 4,950 hiring decisions (10 each), with randomization on which employers are informed that workers will receive free and safe transport home at the end of the shift. As workers are surprised with the transport, employers know that the transport can neither affect which workers apply to the job nor the productivity of the workers on the job. Employers who are not informed about the transport hire 21% fewer women - a decrease of ten percentage points from a baseline of 45% - as shown in Figure 1 in the “No Subsidy” bars.

The demand-side experiment randomizes whether employers are informed that women receive a $10 cash subsidy, an amount large enough to purchase safe transport themselves. Employers hire women significantly less even when women can afford the transport themselves (Figure 1, bar 6). This suggests that employers hire women with safe transport but not the option to purchase transport themselves; they paternalistically decide that women can only do the job with safe transportation.

In an accompanying supply-side experiment, the authors randomize information given to potential job applicants about safe worker transport from the job. Withholding information on transport from potential applicants reduces female labor supply by 15%. This is notable, but is significantly less than the reduction in demand from employers.

Integrating employers’ preference parameters into an equilibrium model, Buchmann et al. estimate that eliminating paternalistic discrimination would reduce the gender employment gap by 48% and the gender wage gap by 68%. This result shows the importance of paternalistic discrimination in perpetuating gender inequality in settings in which employers perceive that jobs include danger or unpleasantness.

Her research highlights the gender gap in persistence, which she defines as “the decision to continue on a career path and keep doing (or trying to do) something even when it is challenging.” Using a controlled experiment with US undergraduate students, Kogelnik finds that men are ten percentage points more likely to continue in challenging environments with ego-relevant feedback, despite equal performance and feedback. This gender gap is attributed to belief formation and men’s greater confidence in future performance and their greater tendency than women to seek additional feedback.

Maria has ongoing work in India investigating how behavioral mechanisms affect gender disparities in economic outcomes as part of the EGC’s Gender and Growth Gaps project. In this work, she uses lab-in-the-field experiments to measure beliefs on gender and how that affects decision-making and bargaining that impact economic outcomes.

See Kogelnik’s website and this EGC Spotlight for more information.

“EGC provides a fantastic academic environment for studying gender questions. It is exciting that the Gender and Growth Gaps research initiative brings together economists from different subfields to investigate gender disparities and the mechanisms driving them.”  - Maria Kogelnik

Ho, Jalota, Karandikar [Working Paper]

Several hundred million women who want a job are out of the labor force, often because available opportunities are incompatible with traditional norms of household roles. In a field experiment with 1,670 households in West Bengal, the authors offer short-term data entry jobs with flexible work arrangements that meet households where they are in terms of expectations on women’s domestic responsibilities. The authors find three sets of results. First, job flexibility more than triples take up, from 15% for an office job to 48% for a job that women can do from home while multitasking with childcare. Second, working from home reduces worker productivity due to interruptions that interfere with flow effects. Third, flexible jobs act as a gateway to outside-the-home jobs for women initially out of the labor force: women who first had an opportunity to work from home are more likely to accept outside-the-home work several months later. This gateway effect may be due to changes in attitudes about appropriate behavior for men and women. Job flexibility is more important to the labor supply of women from more traditional households, and work experience in turn shifts the gender attitudes of these women and their children to become less traditional. Thus, flexible work arrangements can both attract women to the labor force and provide a gateway to outside-the-home jobs.

Agte & Bernhardt [Working Paper]

Caste norms, the religious and social rules that underpin the Hindu caste system, impose strong constraints on behavior: women should stay secluded within the home, caste groups should stay segregated, and certain foods should not be eaten. This paper shows that caste norms are weakened when Hindus live alongside Adivasis, an indigenous minority outside of the caste system. Using a number of estimation strategies, including a historical natural experiment that led to local variation in Adivasi population share, the authors show that having more Adivasi neighbors decreases Hindus’ adherence to a wide range of caste rules. Hindu women in Adivasi-majority villages are 50% more likely to work and have substantially higher earnings. Individuals higher on the caste hierarchy are less likely to practice “untouchability” towards those lower than them and villages are more likely to be integrated. Agte & Bernhardt argue that Hindus adhere to caste norms as an investment in status within the caste system, and that this investment is less valuable when Adivasis—a lower-status out-group—form a larger share of the village population. Consistent with this explanation, caste norms are weaker in areas where British colonial policy led Adivasis to hold more land and political power, increasing the returns to social and economic interactions with Adivasis independent of their population share.

Bursztyn, Cappelen, Tungodden, Voena, Yanagizawa-Drott [Working Paper]

Actual and perceived gender norms are key to understanding gender inequality. Using newly-collected, nationally representative datasets from 60 countries covering 80% of the world population, this paper studies gender norms on two policy issues: basic rights, allowing women to work outside of the home, and affirmative action, prioritizing women when hiring for leadership positions. Misperceptions of gender norms are pervasive across the world, and the nature of the misperception is context-dependent. In less gender-equal countries, people underestimate support for both policies, particularly support among men; in more gender-equal countries, people overestimate support for affirmative action, particularly support among women, and underestimate support for basic rights. Gender stereotyping and overweighting of minority views are potential drivers of the global patterns of misperceptions. These findings indicate how misperceptions of gender norms may obstruct progress toward gender equality and contribute to sustaining gender policies that are not necessarily favored by women.

Kelley, Lane, Pecenco, Rubin [Working Paper]

Many workers are evaluated on their ability to engage with customers. The authors measure the impact of gender-based customer discrimination on the productivity of online sales agents in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using a novel framework that randomly varies the gender of names presented to customers without changing worker behavior, the authors find the assignment of a female-sounding name leads to 50% fewer purchases. Customers also lag in responding, are less expressive, and avoid discussing purchases. The authors show similar results for customers around the world and across workers. Removing customer bias, the paper finds that women would be more productive than their male co-workers.

Avery, Leibbrandt, Vecci [Working Paper]

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recruitment is rapidly increasing and drastically changing how people apply to jobs and how applications are reviewed. This paper uses two field experiments to study how AI recruitment tools can impact gender diversity in the male-dominated technology sector, both overall and separately for labor supply and demand. The authors find that the use of AI in recruitment changes the gender distribution of potential hires, in some cases more than doubling the fraction of top applicants that are women. This change is generated by better outcomes for women in both supply and demand. On the supply side, the use of AI reduces the gender gap in application completion rates. Complementary survey evidence suggests that anticipated bias is a driver of increased female application completion when assessed by AI instead of human evaluators. On the demand side, providing evaluators with applicants’ AI scores closes the gender gap in assessments that otherwise disadvantage female applicants. Finally, the paper shows that the AI tool would have to be substantially biased against women to result in a lower level of gender diversity than found without AI.

Yale Economic Growth Center in collaboration with Institute of Economic Growth, Inclusion Economics India Center, and Yale Inclusion Economics
[Summary Article; Agenda & Bios; Event Materials; Event Home Page]

EGC, Inclusion Economics India Center (IEIC), Yale Inclusion Economics, and the Institute of Economic Growth (IEG) ran a day-long dialogue investigating gender as a dominant friction in India’s labor markets and exploring how policy can address this friction to better enable the country’s economic transformation. The event was held in Delhi on Thursday August 8th, with 163 attendees and prominent experts and decision-makers, including India’s Chief Economic Adviser, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and Secretary, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. On August 9th, a training and mentorship workshop was organised for select Master’s students pursuing careers in economics, with a focus on mentoring Indian women in the field. 

This was the second event focused on South Asia organized under the global ‘Gender and Growth Gaps’ project, housed at EGC, and builds on learnings from our first workshop held in August 2023 in Bengaluru. The photo shows staff from EGC, IEIC, Yale Inclusion Economics, and IEG.

[Devex Article, September 10, 2024]

EGC Deputy Director Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan, and economists Farzana Afridi and Kanika Mahajan are quoted in a Devex article on women’s employment in India, which discusses how a lack of quality jobs for women, a lack of workplace flexibility, and entrenched gender roles, hold women back in the labor market.

[Web Site]

EMERGE is a platform that focuses on measurement of gender equality and empowerment. It is a repository of measures and resources for survey researchers and practitioners. The site includes a focus on norms as one of several “special topics”. The initiative is led by the Newcomb Institute at Tulane University and housed by the Center on Gender Equity and Health (GEH) at the University of California San Diego.