Gender Laws, Values, and Outcomes: Evidence from the World Values Survey - Working Paper 452

Charles Kenny
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Charles Kenny and Dev Patel

No 452, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: This paper analyzes six waves of responses from the World Values Survey to understand the determinants of beliefs about women’s roles in society and their relationship with the legal system and outcomes. Using survey data for 300,000 individuals, we find that characteristics of an individual’s home country only explain about a fifth of the variation in values, and a single individual can report strongly different norms about women’s equality across different domains. There is a strong correlation between norms, laws and female labor force participation and between norms and the proportion of legislators who are women—but not between norms and relative female tertiary education. There is some suggestive evidence that laws may be more significant than norms in determining female employment outcomes, but the available evidence does not allow for strong causal statements at the cross-country level.

Keywords: Values; Economics of Gender; Human Development; Gender Law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 J16 K38 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2017-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:wpaper:452

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