Principal investigator: Adriano Valladão Pires Ribeiro
Article title: THE ECONOMICS AND POLITICS OF WOMEN'S RIGHTS
Article authors: Matthias Doepke, Michèle Tertilt and Alessandra Voena
Sample size: 189 countries
Main theme: Genre
Type of intervention: The impact of women's rights on development.
Primary variable of interest: Women's rights
Evaluation method: Other – Survey
Policy Problem
In developed countries, women have gained legal, property, political, and economic rights over the last 200 years. This period was also marked by strong economic growth in these countries, raising the question of the relationship between these two events. That is, what are the causes and implications for the economy of changes in women's rights?
Evaluation Context
A comparison of data between countries illustrates the relationship between women's rights and income levels. The UNDP's Gender Participation Measure (GEM), an index that aggregates women's legal rights and economic status, has a correlation of 0,8 with GDP per capita. data available from the OECD Grouping countries into four income levels (high, upper-middle, lower-middle, low) also suggests a positive relationship between economic development and women's empowerment. Specifically, in high-income countries women have almost equal access to land, property, and credit as men, while in low-income countries they are excluded.
Other metrics such as family authority, inheritance practices, repudiation of divorce laws, and polygyny are all biased in favor of men in low-income countries, compared to the lack of gender favoritism in higher-income countries. That is, in poorer countries, laws tend to give authority to the father in a family, favor sons in inheritance matters, leave women unprotected in cases of divorce, and accept polygyny. On the other hand, high-income countries have greater legal protection against harassment, rape, and domestic violence, in addition to the absence of female genital mutilation and mandatory veiling. Regarding political rights, women's suffrage occurred, on average, almost 40 years earlier in high-income countries than in low-income countries. Finally, it is also observed that the proportion of women in Congress is higher in high-income countries, although in all cases this proportion is lower than the proportion of men.
Intervention Details
One point that draws attention is the reasons for women's empowerment, that is, how it happened, especially considering that, until suffrage, all legislators were male. One explanation can be attributed to changes in cultural factors; that is, women's empowerment movements would be responsible for a slow process of changing attitudes towards gender equality. When combined with economic changes that strengthen the movement, this would ultimately lead legislators to recognize women's rights. Another explanation relates to technological changes, in the sense of a dispute between two paradigms. This would occur, for example, when the expansion of rights increased opportunities in the job market for women, resulting in a trade-off between higher family income and less decision-making power for men. This argument would also include the relationship between guaranteeing more power for men in the family unit and protecting their daughters from a future husband, just as the higher proportion of men would lessen the burden of approving measures in favor of women, such as suffrage.
Given both the relationship between women's rights and economic development, and the two reasons for legal changes favoring women's empowerment, it remains to explore the mechanisms that cause these changes. That is, how does women's empowerment lead to economic development and, conversely, how is development key to the political expansion of women's rights? These two factors complement and reinforce each other.
For this exercise, the focus will be on explaining the trade-off between greater power for men within the family unit and the guarantee of increased rights for daughters, and how this relationship elucidates the emergence of empowerment when women did not yet have the right to vote. On the one hand, more rights for a married woman would increase her bargaining power and her share in household decision-making, therefore it would be frowned upon by men. On the other hand, men would care about their daughters and would want them to have more rights to protect themselves from their husbands. In a scenario where women do not make political decisions, what allows us to explain female empowerment lies in the relationship between mothers and children. Mothers would care more about the well-being of their children, that is, greater decision-making power for them would imply educational gains for their children and, given the positive effects of education on income that comes with development, greater well-being. Thus, the relationship between education and development is a prerequisite for the expansion of women's rights, and this feeds back into gains in education, creating a virtuous circle between development and the expansion of women's rights.
Results
This paper presents the economic impacts of increased women's rights regarding resource redistribution, access to the labor market, and voting. Evidence suggests that redistribution in favor of women's property rights has led to higher rates of physical investment, human capital investment, and lower fertility rates. In the US, the right to own and manage a business without a husband has been observed to have led to an increase in the number of patents by female inventors. In developing countries, where agriculture is of great importance, access to and ownership of land become relevant and affect investment incentives. Indeed, in Zimbabwe, women's investment is lower on land where property rights are uncertain due to marriage. In Nepal, women's property rights are associated with better child health indicators, while in Peru, access to land is linked to lower fertility rates.
The expansion of political rights and voting rights impacts both the composition of legislators, increasing women's participation, and the aspirations of the electorate, since women may have distinct social preferences. In fact, the greater presence of women seems to have changed the composition and increased government spending on social and public health programs, as observed in the US and some Western European countries. Finally, the increase in women's rights over their bodies and lives has also had repercussions on the economy. Access to oral contraceptives, for example, increases women's control over when to have a child and, consequently, their participation and career choices in the labor market.
Lessons in Public Policy
The lesson from the above study concerns the causes and consequences of expanding women's rights. A positive relationship was found between rights and GDP per capita (an indicator of economic development) for countries today, with gains in education being the link between female empowerment and development. Thus, as this association becomes strong enough in today's poor countries, the path would be one of expanding rights. Consequences of empowerment include the redistribution and increase in government spending on health, children, and education, as well as increased investment in physical and human capital.
Reference
Doepke, Matthias; Tertilt, Michele; Voena, Alessandra. “The Economics and Politics of Women’s Rights.” IZA Discussion Papers 6215, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), 2011.
