Does Gender Equality Promote Social Trust? An Empirical Analysis

Seo-Young Cho

World Development, 2016, vol. 88, issue C, 175-187

Abstract: Fairness is an important factor that promotes social trust by reducing social heterogeneity and gaps between people. This paper empirically investigates whether gender equality—fairness between men and women—increases social trust by analyzing a global sample from the World Values Survey. The findings show that gender discriminatory values negatively affect the trust levels of both men and women, while women’s status in labor, education, and political dimensions is not a significant determinant. These results indicate that values regarding gender equality (fair values) are arguably more important to social trust than the actual socioeconomic conditions of women (fair conditions). Furthermore, the effect of gender equality varies across countries with different levels of gender endowments. Gender-related values are an important factor of social trust in countries where gender equality is relatively high, but its effect is minimal in countries with greater gender discrimination. This finding implies that fairness is a more essential social value in countries where equality is already established. Finally, the empirical investigation finds a stronger effect of gender equality on men than on women—especially in high gender-equal countries. This result contradicts the initial expectation that gender equality influences women more significantly and thus, the effect should be larger for them. A possible explanation for this result is that gender equality establishes a more trustworthy environment of men which increases their trust level more.

Keywords: social trust; gender equality; fairness; values survey; worldwide (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X16304272
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Does gender equality promote social trust? An empirical analysis (2015)
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:eee:wdevel:v:88:y:2016:i:c:p:175-187

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.07.019

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().