Women’s Work, Social Norms, and the Marriage Market

Farzana Afridi, Abhishek Arora, Diva Dhar and Kanika Mahajan

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2025, vol. 74, issue 1, 141 - 179

Abstract: We conduct an experiment to elicit preferences for partners on an online marriage market platform in India. We find that working women are 12.8% less likely to receive interest from male suitors. Additionally, women employed in “masculine” occupations are 3.3% less likely to elicit interest from suitors relative to those in “feminine” occupations. Men hailing from higher castes and northern India, where communities have more conservative gender-related preferences, are less likely to show interest in working women. Our results highlight the role of patriarchal gender attitudes in marital preferences and suggest that expectations regarding returns in the marriage market may influence women’s labor market choices.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/735202 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/735202 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/735202

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().