Patriarchy, development, and the divergence of women's empowerment

Abstract

How do culture and development interact to determine women's empowerment? I develop a simple model of women's labor supply in which economic development simultaneously reduces the stigma against women working and relaxes the consumption constraint that often forces poor women to work. The model predicts that women's labor supply will follow a U-shaped relationship, falling and then rising as development proceeds. In addition, in countries with more patriarchal values, women's labor supply will be lower, fall over a greater income range, and then rise more slowly on the upward sloping portion of the curve. I investigate and confirm these predictions in a broad sample of countries employing six different measures of historical patriarchy as well as a composite measure of patriarchal history. These findings indicate that as economic development proceeds, women's labor supply will diverge across countries as differences in the intensity of patriarchal values play an ever larger role in the allocation of women's labor.