Misperceived Social Norms: Female Labor Force Participation in Saudi Arabia

Leonardo Bursztyn, Alessandra L. González and David Yanagizawa-Drott

No 24736, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Through the custom of guardianship, husbands typically have the final word on their wives’ labor supply decisions in Saudi Arabia, a country with very low female labor force participation (FLFP). We provide incentivized evidence (both from an experimental sample in Riyadh and from a national sample) that the vast majority of young married men in Saudi Arabia privately support FLFP outside of home from a normative perspective, while they substantially underestimate the level of support for FLFP by other similar men – even men from their same social setting, such as their neighbors. We then show that randomly correcting these beliefs about others increases married men’s willingness to let their wives join the labor force (as measured by their costly sign-up for a job-matching service for their wives). Finally, we find that this decision maps onto real outcomes: four months after the main intervention, the wives of men in our original sample whose beliefs about acceptability of FLFP were corrected are more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job outside of home. Together, our evidence indicates a potentially important source of labor market frictions, where job search is underprovided due to misperceived social norms.

JEL-codes: C90 D83 D91 J22 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-exp, nep-lma and nep-soc
Note: DEV LS POL
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (78)

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Working Paper: Misperceived Social Norms: Female Labor Force Participation in Saudi Arabia (2018)
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