The Weight of Patriarchy? Gender Obesity Gaps in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)

Joan Costa-Font and Mario Gyori ()
Additional contact information
Mario Gyori: London School of Economics

No 13687, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The worldwide obesity epidemic has impacted women more heavily than men. These gender-based differences are particularly pronounced in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region where gender obesity gaps on average exceed 10 percentage points. This paper examines one of the explanations, namely the role of female empowerment on gender gaps in obesity. We study the effect of several measures of female empowerment including female labour market participation on gender obesity gaps over a time span of 41 years (1975-2016) in a sample of 190 countries. We document that after controlling for a number of relevant controls, gender obesity gaps are only associated to measures of female empowerment in the MENA region but that this is not true worldwide. We then use an instrumental variable approach in order to illustrate that the causality runs indeed from empowerment, proxy it by both labour market and political participation to gender obesity gaps and not vice versa. Our results reveal that a one percentage point increase in female labor market participation (female MPs in national parliament) predicts a 0.2 (0.09) percentage point decrease in gender gaps in obesity in the MENA region.

Keywords: obesity; female overweight; female empowerment; female labour market participation; female political participation; Middle East and North Africa Region (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I18 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-gen, nep-hea and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Social Science and Medicine , 220, 266, 113353

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13687.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The weight of patriarchy? Gender obesity gaps in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) (2020)
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:iza:izadps:dp13687

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().