Gender Biased Beliefs and Legal Inequality

Siwan Anderson

No 22101, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Gender-biased beliefs are widely viewed as an important obstacle to achieving legal gender equality. This paper examines whether historical gender stereotypes embedded in oral storytelling traditions have an enduring relationship with contemporary legal discrimination against women. Drawing on cross-country measures of folklore narratives, we find that historical gender stereotypes are strongly associated with discriminatory laws governing the family, including marriage, divorce, and inheritance. By contrast, we find little evidence of a correlation with laws regulating women's economic opportunities or access to government benefits. The results further show that the relevant cultural narratives are those portraying men as violent and dominant and women as subordinate and dependent, rather than those assigning men and women distinct traditional economic roles. These findings suggest that historical beliefs concerning power and authority within the family, rather than the gendered division of labour, constitute the cultural dimension most closely associated with the persistence of legal gender inequality.

Date: 2026-10
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