CeDEx Brown Bag Seminar - Monika Pompeo

Monika will present on 9 July 2020 at 1pm - via MS Teams

Women's self-discriminatory attitudes in developing countries, fact or fiction?

Abstract: Surveys conducted in developing countries report a high share of women agreeing with statements prescribing gender discrimination and female submission to either males in general or to the husband. In this project, we ask whether women’s gender role attitudes reflect their preferences (else internalised gender norms) or do they simply reflect agreement with what is perceived as the socially acceptable thing to do. We aim at developing a method that would allow us to discern between these two explanations based on the use of an information provision experiment. We generate exogenous variation in beliefs about the environment by providing our treatment group with the prevailing norm and not providing any information to the control group. We then observe whether information changes the subject's behaviour as measured by donations to a charity working for women's empowerment. A change in behaviour would indicate that women’s stated attitudes reflect conformity to what they perceived to be the norm. Failure to identify a change in behaviour supports the hypothesis that women hold attitudes that could be considered as self-discriminatory. Our study serves the purpose to better direct policy, as the two explanations ask for different interventions.

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