Who Gets Punished for Challenging Gender Norms? Experimental Evidence on the Enforcement of Housework Norms in Rural Mexico

Alejandra Villegas
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Alejandra Villegas: Department of Economics, Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de Mexico

Working Paper Series Sobre México from Sobre México. Temas en economía

Abstract: This article examines how social norms are enforced through evaluative behavior in the domain of unpaid domestic labor. I implement an online experiment combining an incentivized coordination task to elicit perceived community norms with a two-round dictator-type allocation task. Participants first allocate lottery tickets to a virtual recipient identified only by sex; they then allocate tickets to the same recipient after observing a domestic-work allocation that either conforms to, exceeds, or falls below the elicited reference norm. The main outcome is the within-evaluator change in transfers, which captures whether norm-relevant information induces evaluative rewards or sanctions. The results show that responses to norm deviation are relational and asymmetric. Evaluative transfers vary with the gender of the recipient, the direction of the deviation from the reference norm, and the evaluator's own normative position. In particular, allocations that reduce women's expected share of domestic work, and therefore move toward a more egalitarian division of labor, tend to elicit more negative responses when associated with male rather than female recipients, especially among evaluators with more traditional views about domestic labor. By experimentally varying norm compliance and linking it to allocation behavior, the paper provides behavioral evidence on how informal enforcement mechanisms may sustain gendered divisions of unpaid work even when egalitarian arrangements are available.

JEL-codes: C91 D64 D91 J16 J22 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-06-15
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