Perceived abilities and gender stereotypes within the household: experimental evidence from Bangladesh

Carlotta Nani
Additional contact information
Carlotta Nani: Geneva Graduate Institute

No 19-2024, IHEID Working Papers from Economics Section, The Graduate Institute of International Studies

Abstract: Is it possible to improve women's agency by providing information about their abilities? Using a lab experiment in the field, I study how perceived abilities and gender stereotypes shape intra-household dynamics. I use an incentivized decision-making game with 525 married couples from 42 rural villages in Bangladesh to investigate whether women are discriminated against because they are perceived to be less skilled than their husband, and whether it is possible to reduce this gender bias within households. During the game, I provide information on women's abilities and I observe how beliefs and decisions change. The empirical analysis shows that the less capable women are perceived compared to men, the less they are involved in decisionmaking. After the information treatment, husbands with the lowest regard for their wife's skills are 20 percent more likely to make allocations in her favour. The treatment has a larger impact on younger couples, on men with stronger control preferences and on risk-averse women. This brings further evidence of the inability of spouses to observe each other's skills. Two weeks after the experiment, women in treated couples report being more involved in household decisions. These results suggest that gender discrimination within households has a statistical component that can be corrected by increasing skills' observability.

Keywords: Bangladesh; field experiment; gender discrimination; intra-household dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 D83 D91 J12 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2024-09-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-inv and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.graduateinstitute.ch/pdfs/Working_papers/HEIDWP19-2024.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gii:giihei:heidwp19-2024

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IHEID Working Papers from Economics Section, The Graduate Institute of International Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dorina Dobre ().