Configurations of Ancestral Norms and Women’s Empowerment

Ulugbek Aminjonov () and Olivier Bargain ()
Additional contact information
Ulugbek Aminjonov: Institute for Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU), Trier University
Olivier Bargain: Bordeaux University

No 202607, IAAEU Discussion Papers from Institute of Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU)

Abstract: This paper examines how combinations of ancestral cultural norms are associated with women’s empowerment across ethnic groups worldwide. Linking Demographic and Health Surveys to ancestral traits from the Ethnographic Atlas, we develop a hybrid supervised– unsupervised approach combining Partial Least Squares with k-means clustering to identify multidimensional normative configurations. We identify five probabilistic regimes spanning the empowerment gradient. Severe disempowerment is associated with an accumulation of restrictive norms, while religious norms and women’s role in agriculture distinguish higherempowerment environments within otherwise broadly patriarchal configurations. Further up the gradient, contrasts concern first hierarchical social institutions, then kinship structures and the loosening of patriarchal arrangements, before less traditional, more gender-neutral configurations become widespread at the highest levels of empowerment. The salience of norms varies with the configurations in which they are embedded, revealing strongly non-monotonic patterns. These findings remain robust to accounting for contemporary socioeconomic conditions and to a range of sensitivity checks. Overall, the analysis provides a global mapping of ancestral normative environments associated with women’s agency and helps identify the configurations most closely related to severe intrahousehold inequality.

Keywords: women’s empowerment; ancestral norms; cultural persistence; kinship systems; machine learning; gender inequality; DHS; Ethnographic Atlas (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C38 D13 J16 O15 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 78 pages
Date: 2026-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-mid and nep-soc
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.iaaeu.de/images/DiscussionPaper/2026_07.pdf First version, 2026 (application/pdf)

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:iaa:dpaper:202607

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAAEU Discussion Papers from Institute of Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Adrian Chadi ().