View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.

uk brought to you by CORE

provided by Helsingin yliopiston digitaalinen arkisto

öMmföäflsäafaäsflassflassflas
ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

Discussion Papers

Development and Gender Equality:

Consequences, Causes, Challenges and Cures

Anne Mikkola
University of Helsinki, HECER and RUESG

and

Carrie A. Miles
Center for the Economic Study of Religion at George Mason University,
Institute for the Studies of Religion at Baylor University

Discussion Paper No. 159

April 2007

ISSN 1795-0562

HECER – Helsinki Center of Economic Research, P.O. Box 17 (Arkadiankatu 7), FI-00014
University of Helsinki, FINLAND, Tel +358-9-191-28780, Fax +358-9-191-28781,
E-mail [email protected], Internet www.hecer.fi
HECER
Discussion Paper No. 159

Development and Gender Equality:

Consequences, Causes, Challenges and Cures*
Abstract
This paper reviews economics literature on the relationship between gender equality and
economic development. Stylized facts indicate that women’ s roles are, although restricted,
in the midst of quite dramatic change, both in developing and in developed countries.
Results of both empirical and theoretical research, explanatory models and studies
exploring both forces that challenge and those that facilitate greater equality are
presented. The literature covers issues in gender inequality and economic development
as they relate to: values and religion, cultural restrictions and roles, legal and inheritance
laws and practices, education of girls, resource allocation within marriage patterns, labor
market access, education, fertility, gender specific market failures in finance, and power in
the political decision making. We suggest that the findings in the literature are compatible
with the long term trends in women’ s roles in western countries that stem from
technological improvement, as industrialization has made extensive home-based
production obsolete, and reduced the demand for children. In this case, greater gender
equality would be rather a consequence than a cause of development. However, gender
equality does not seem to follow automatically from development, but there is a need for
active policies.

JEL Classification: O10, J16, J71, D63

Keywords: Gender equality, development, women, segregation, discrimination,

specialization, stylized facts

Anne Mikkola Carrie A. Miles

Department of Economics Center for the Economic Study of

University of Helsinki Religion
P.O. Box 17 (Arkadiankatu 7) 5365 Ashleigh Road
FI-00014 University of Helsinki Fairfax, Virginia 22030
FINLAND U.S.A.

e-mail: [email protected] e-mail: [email protected]

* Anne Mikkola thanks Anna-Leena Asikainen, Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, Pertti Haaparanta, Marja-
Liisa Halko, Seppo Honkapohja, Vesa Kanniainen, Erkki Koskela, Biing-Shen Kuo, Ulla Lehmijoki,
Heikki Loikkanen, and Maiju Perälä for their comments as well as the participants of the HECER Lunch
Seminar, 2005, Nordic Conference on Development Studies in Göteborg, 2004,
Kansantaloustieteenpäivät, 2004, the DEVESTU Seminar on Political economy of aid and poverty in
Kellokoski, 2004, and the Women Economists Meeting, 2003. Carrie Miles thanks the Institute for the
Studies of Religion at Baylor University for their financial support, and Laurence R. Iannaccone for his
insightful comments and suggestions.
Table of Contents

1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 3

2 Definition of gender equality ................................................................................... 6

3 Stylized facts: The relative status of men and women........................................... 7

4 Methodological issues .............................................................................................12

5 Impact of gender equality on growth .....................................................................15

6 Impact of increased economic resources on gender equality ................................22

7 Political consequences of empowering women.......................................................29

8 Technological change behind development and gender equality .........................32

9 Achieving gender equality: Challenges and Cures ...............................................37

10 Summary and conclusions ....................................................................................48

2
1 Introduction

How is the relative status of women and men related to economic growth and development?

In many parts of the world, women have few resources or rights and little opportunity to improve their

lives. They are restricted in terms of education, ownership of property, monetary return for their work,

financial opportunities, and opportunities to influence decision-making at the level of the family and

society. Country by country, the lack of resources and opportunities open to women is strongly

associated with society-wide poverty or lack of development. Charles Humana (1992), for example,

reports that almost all of the countries ranked in the top quintile of wealth provide social and economic

equality to women; none of those in the poorest quintile do.

This paper reviews the economic literature that touches the role of gender in the economy,

with specific focus on issues that might be expected to be the most critical for overall development.

We note that many researchers’ interest in this subject goes beyond the usual academic attempts to

describe behavior to positions of moral and political advocacy. We define what gender equality

means; present stylized facts about the current relative status of women and men; and touch on the

methodological difficulties encountered in studying this topic. We then present the issues and analyses

from studies concerning gender equality and the status of women in both the developed and the less

developed worlds. There is wide range in women’s status across countries, just as there is a wide range

of differences in the level of economic welfare. In some cases the research allows a look at how a

country’s economic development over time is associated with changes in the role of her women.

Economic studies of this issue are found in the fields of labor economics, family economics, growth

and development economics and political economics. The latter portion of this paper presents

explanatory models, and reviews literature on factors that challenge or facilitate gender equality.

Significance of the question

Economists have long tried to understand why some countries are poor and some rich, and

why some develop and grow while others remain stagnant. As research has moved from Solow’s

3
growth theories to endogenous growth, we are still unable to explain the huge difference in GDP per

capita that exists among countries. Explanations that developed countries have greater technological

progress, a higher rate of investment and saving, better education, skill levels and infrastructure leave

unanswered the question of where these differences come from (see Weil, 2005). Macroeconomics

theories have influenced the World Bank and the IMF policies over the decades as these institutions

attempted to help developing countries towards economic growth and development. Easterly (2001)

recounts the history of attempted solutions that have repeatedly turned out to be disappointments, a

situation he explains as the result of a lack of attention to the incentives that people face in their

environments. The literature and its prominent authors are currently moving towards explaining the

growth discrepancy between the poor and the rich nations with factors like social infrastructure (Hall

and Jones, 1999), values (Guiso et al., 2002), trust (Knack and Keefer, 1997), religion (Barro, 2002;

Dollar and Gatti, 1999) or other aspects of the culture (Weil, 2005). These new explanations will

increasingly require a better understanding of the roles, status and behavior of a heretofore largely

ignored half of the population – women.

These new efforts sometimes involve expanding our understanding of what is meant by the

concept of development itself. Most prominently, Noble-laureate Amartya Sen (1999) argues that

increasing GDP by itself should not be the ultimate goal of efforts to help poor countries. Rather, what

aid should hope to maximize are the freedoms associated with wealth: freedom to exchange goods and

labor, freedom to make choices and influence one’s life, freedom to live longer, freedom to get an

education. He suggest that restrictions on an individual’s right to own property, save, borrow, become

educated, make labor contracts or to control the products of one’s own labor would qualify as

disincentives to growth, while freedom to exercise these activities would be associated with economic

growth. Given that roughly half of the population of any country is female, it is reasonable to

postulate that a society’s failure to provide such freedoms or resources to them would be reflected in

failures at the macroeconomics level as well.

Although the literature exploring such a relationship between the freedoms accorded women

and development is still small, interest in this area is growing. Those in grass root development work

4
generally acknowledge the importance of the status of women in development, believing that these

restrictions on freedoms are directly counterproductive for development. The United Nations

Millennium Development Goals, for example, include gender issues among the top priorities. United

Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the World Bank have also done extensive research on

gender and development.

Generally speaking, however, much of the work in economics has little theoretical interest in

women’s welfare per se. Standard economic theories such as those in public choice or welfare

economics do not focus on individual characteristics; the individual actor in welfare economics could

equally well be a world citizen, a country national, a man or a woman. However, empirical work

requires that gender be controlled for, as women’s behavior differs from that of men to such an extent

that a single explanatory model is not applicable. An example of this will be seen in the empirical

growth studies by Robert Barro.

Those writing in the feminist economics tradition challenge the general invisibility of gender

in economic studies and urge that it be considered in order to avoid further biased results (Ferber and

Nelson 2003). Emphasizing efficiency at the cost of equity, economists shy away from interpersonal

utility comparisons. Yet, if the welfare of women is important, we need to identify the separate

constraints on women in order to assess how lifting them affects economic choice and development.

We need to be aware of cultural issues such as gender restrictions (on both sexes), and changes

in them, when analyzing the effect of gender-related issues on development. Blank and Reimers

(2003) point out that the standard economic method of focusing on choices under given tastes and

constraints tends to simply accept the status quo concerning cultural issues as permanent and

unchanging. This raises concern given the large changes in gender roles over the past hundred years.

Psychology, sociology, and anthropology give insights on how such tastes and desires are formed.

However, the economists tend to be relatively uninformed on the results of other social sciences.

Some of the newer fields in economics, such as behavioral economics, take these challenges more

seriously. Another example of rising awareness of the need to consider changing social norms and

5
culture is a recent book on economic growth by David Weil (2005), which places considerable

emphasis on culture and values.

2 Definition of gender equality

Our definition for gender inequality arises from reading of various social sciences literature,

including economics: it manifests as hierarchical genders relations, with men above women, and

women being regarded as inferior and less valuable solely by virtue of their sex. Although the

literature predominantly focuses on women we recognize that men in less developed countries also

suffer from behaviors and policies that foster hierarchical gender relations. Gender hierarchy is

manifested in family relationships, inheritance laws and customs; valuations of women’s work and its

general invisibility; and the power to make decisions in society, the family, work place, religious and

other cultural institutions. It is apparent in the relative opportunities available to women and girls for

development, education, health and nutrition and in the pattern of violence between the sexes. Such

hierarchy is generally accepted by both genders, and it is not normally questioned within its cultural

context.

Gender equality, in contrast, is expressed in attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and policies that

reflect an equal valuing and provision of opportunities for both genders. Further definitions of gender

inequality can be found in United Nations declarations of human rights beginning in 1948. In 1979, the

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was

adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. As of June 2003 174 countries – 90% of the UN

members – are party to the convention. The convention defines discrimination as "any distinction,

exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex….in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or

any other field.” Lack of discrimination in this sense could be seen as equal status between genders.

As opposed to inter-gender power hierarchy or a separatism where everyone is self-interested and

autonomous, in gender equality all individuals hold a similar level of power and treat other people with

respect and consideration, regardless of their sex (Nelson and England, 2002). Our framework for

6
understanding gender relationships therefore sees them as falling along a spectrum, with gender power

hierarchy and restrictions at one end and equal opportunities and equal value for both sexes at the

other.

We will next gather statistical data across the nations to get a perspective on the economic

significance and nature of gender hierarchy in today’s world. Where possible we also report the

changes over time.

3 Stylized facts: The relative status of men and women

On a global level, relative to men, women’s lives are more centered in the home, a fact which

is immediately related to observed gender biases. In less developed nations, this domestic-

specialization effectively excludes women and girls from society at large. The exclusion can be

externally-imposed, as in some developing or Arabic countries, or internally by the women’s own

choices. Societal norms and rules may exclude women from particular types of paid employment or

leadership positions. On the other hand men may be excluded from child care and the home sphere,

which is considered the woman’s territory. This traditional division of labor within the household

makes some of the stylized facts that follow understandable.

Son preference
The lesser valuation of females can be observed at birth, manifested in the prevalence of son

preference. It appears strikingly in the statistics of newborns in China, India and South Korea. In these

countries, for every 100 girls born at least 9 are “missing” – never born or somehow disposed of

shortly after birth. Part of this is due to modern technology that allows prenatal sex determination and

consequent abortion of a fetus of the unwanted sex, an option apparently used with frequency in India

and China. In modeling son preference and marriage patterns Edlund (1999) simply assumes that the

parents’ utility from a male child is higher than from a girl child. Dahl and Moretti (2004) report

surprisingly strong evidence for gender bias even in the US census data, although this bias has

7
decreased over time. They find that couples with girl children divorce more often than couples with

boys. These studies measure son preference by observing the prevalence of couples having another

child based on the sex of the couples’ existing children. Preference for sons or daughters is measured

by looking at the incidence of couples choosing to have another child when they already have two or

three children of one sex: Son preference is indicated when a couple is more likely to have another

child when they already have two or three daughters instead of the same number of sons. They also

find that women who have ultrasound examinations and discover that they are carrying a girl are 0.37

percentage points less likely to be married at the time of the delivery than are women who learned they

are carrying a boy. Andersson et al. (2004) report gender biases even in Nordic countries, which are

considered to be among the most gender equal in the world. They find the regular son preference in

Finland, while other Nordic countries have reported a daughter preference since mid 1980s. This

suggests that son preference may turn into daughter preference as societal gender systems change.

Education
Over the past four decades there have been large and successful efforts to extend primary

education to all children, including girls. In the developing countries as a whole, the average school

years for girls (boys) has increased from 1.4 (2.6) years in 1960 to 4.3 (5.9) years in 2000 (Barro and

Lee, 2001). In the countries that the United Nation Development Program classifies as having low

human development, female literacy rate ranges between 10-85% with a typical gender gap (the

difference between the percentage of literate men and the percentage of literate women) of around 20.

The higher the national income and development the smaller the gender gap (see figure 2). Between

1970 and 1998, this gap has been reduced by more than five percent, with the greatest reduction

occurring in low-income countries.

Universities in all countries excluded women nearly until the turn of the twentieth century.

The first female student was admitted into the University of Helsinki in 1870, after receiving a special

exception of gender. A year later the Massachusetts Institute for Technology admitted its first female

student “as an experiment” (source: Univ. of Helsinki and the MIT web pages). The success of this

8
experiment can be seen in current university enrollment figures both in Finland, most other EU

countries and the United States. Institutions of higher education in these countries enroll more female

than male students (See Eurostat, 2001 and US Census). However, gender equity in higher education

is far less common in developing countries (Barro and Lee, 2001).

Employment and total work

Women have become an increasing part of the labor force over the past 30 years (see Figure

3). According to the World Bank statistics women’s labor force participation as a ratio of men’s has

increased from about 50 percent to about 80 percent in the high-income countries. In the low-income

countries this ratio has also increased, from 60 to 70 percent, while remaining stable at about 60

percent in middle-income countries.

Women’s pay relative to men’s in full time employment is reported in Figure 4 for some

European countries. This ratio varies between 70 and 90 percent with a general increase from 1995 to

1997 in all the reported countries (France, Denmark, UK, Finland and Germany). The extreme gender

segregation in the EU labor markets is portrayed in figure 5. Women comprise about 80% of the total

employment in the service sector but less than 20% of the industrial sectors in all of these countries.

When women do work for pay, they earn about 80% of the pay that men receive when

working full time. These data will be discussed in more detail later. Additionally, women work part

time more frequently than do men, which also shows in their earnings. It is difficult to get comparable

data for developing countries, but there is no doubt that women’s earning status relative to men’s is

even lower there.

In terms of total working hours, including both the market and the household work, there is a

widespread belief that women work more than men in the most developed countries. Burda,

Hamermesh and Weil (2007) however show this belief to be untrue. They use detailed time use data in

richer, middle income, Southern European and some African countries respectively. Total working

time of men and women is found to be on average almost identical in the richer countries. There is

large variation across cultures, subgroups, or overtime, but it is not based on gender. However, women

9
do work more than men in Africa and in the Southern European countries. Economic development

seems to be associated with more equal sharing of working time, even if the earnings gap has not

equalized even in the richer countries.

Decision making power

Until relatively recently, women have been afforded less decision making power and fewer

legal rights than men in all social arenas. In developing countries laws of inheritance and ownership

generally disfavor women more than in developed countries, which may be a significant factor

affecting the financial resources women have at their disposal. At the political level women also have

less voice. A hundred years ago, women were without the right to vote anywhere in the world. In the

US, the struggle for women’s suffrage started in the mid 1800’s by Susan B. Anthony and several

other women1 who joined forces with black men – the latter gaining the right to vote before the white

women, who achieved their goal only in 1920. One of the first countries in the world to introduce

universal suffrage was Finland in the 1906 Parliament Act (Source: www.eduskunta.fi). Figures 6 and

7 portray the percentage of women in ministerial and sub-ministerial positions in some developed

countries and some developing countries respectively in 1996. In most developed countries women

hold 5-15 % of the higher positions. Finland and Sweden are exceptions, with about third of the

ministerial positions held by women. In developing countries women frequently hold less than five

percent of the higher ranking positions in the society. Most recent data on women’s share in

parliaments (lower or single House) reveals a steady increase in women’s share globally. In the past 10

years, the number of countries in which women’s share is more than 20 percent has increased from 20

to 50 (Source: http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/arc/classif310107.htm).

Another important area of decision making with economic implications concerns a woman’s

control over her own sexuality and the number of children she bears. In developing countries in

particular, customs and norms tend to restrict the choices women are able to make in this respect. High
1
Not incidentally, many of these women were Quakers, who are known for their egalitarian non-
hierarchical beliefs and practices.

10
fertility is associated with less education for women, less frequent labor market participation outside

the home and fewer economic opportunities. In 1980, the total fertility rate (births per woman) was

twice as high globally as in the high-income countries. There has been considerable convergence in

fertility between the rich and the poor over the past 20 years, however. By 1998 the number of

children per woman in low income countries had fallen from about six to just above four (excluding

China and India). Including China and India, which account for 40% of the world’s population, the

average number of children per woman in low-income countries was three, while the figure for high-

income countries was less than two (see figure 8). Poor and agriculturally-based countries continue to

have high birthrates, although rates have fallen there as well. In Uganda, for example, the average

woman bears seven children today, the same as 40 years ago (World Bank, 2004).

Status of men
Jacobsen (2002) focuses on the men’s issues in development and reports detailed country data

on areas where men are disadvantaged relative to women. Addressing these issues would work

towards gender equality by raising the status of men and through them women as well.

Life expectancy

Men’s disadvantage relative to women shows most strikingly in their lower life expectancy.

With few exceptions men’s life expectancy is shorter than women’s by several years. There is

variation across countries but only in a few poor countries do men have equal or longer life expectancy

than women. In the majority of the countries the average man’s life span is shorter than the average

woman’s by two to seven years. The extreme case is Russia, where men’s expected life span is 12.4

years shorter than women’s. An explanation for differences of such magnitude appears to lie in men’s

greater susceptibility in many categories of human capital destruction - suicide, war and violence,

occupational injury, substance abuse and diseases of various kinds.

11
Changing roles and marginalization

There appears to be considerable inequality among men within most countries, a fact that

manifests itself in the marginalization of those worse off economically. Jacobsen argues that the

marginalized men – such as those imprisoned, immigrating or single – may be systematically invisible

and omitted from the published statistics. This may correspond to the large numbers of female-headed

households and their measured, visible, poverty.

Men generally have higher variability in their outcomes than women, being disproportionately

represented among high achievers and low achievers as measured by grades, test scores and incomes.

Observed variation across societies suggests that the differences are cultural rather than genetic.

Jacobsen has also studied the changing structure of work in the developed countries. When

women began to enter the labor force in large numbers in the 1970s, they moved to the growing

service sectors of the economy. Men were disproportionately in the declining sectors, like

manufacturing, mining, and agriculture. Galor and Weil (1996) point out that men have lost some of

the rewards for their comparative advantage in physical strength as the societies have become more

capital and knowledge-based. They explain the increase in women’s relative wages by means of a

model in which women and men have equal quantities of brains, but men have more brawn. With

development, the return to brawn has fallen relative to brains.

4 Methodological issues
Measurement

Creating any single measure of gender equality for the purpose of cross country comparisons

may be misleading for several reasons. Within the developed world the role of the welfare state,

markets and family differ from country to country. These organizational and cultural differences lead

to different labor market participation rates, rates of part-time versus full time employment, wage

12
versus transfer payments, childcare arrangements, etc. It is also difficult to allocate the incomes,

wealth and consumptions within families to its individual members.

Perhaps for these reasons, there appears to be no single measure or index that attempts to

quantify the status of women relative to men at the global level. The Human Development report

published by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP, 2003) uses two different indices: the

Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). They are

both based on the human development index (HDI2), which is adjusted downwards for gender

inequality (see UNIFEM, 2000, p.103). Consequently the GDI and the GEM measure primarily the

level of economic welfare in the country rather than women’s relative status. GDI falls if the

achievement levels of both women and men fall or if the disparity between their achievements

increases. GEM examines whether women and men are able to actively participate in economic and

political life and take part in decision-making. It is constructed using information on women’s

purchasing power and decision-making power in the economy and political power in parliament.

Invisible products
Another measurement problem is the tendency for the products of some of women’s activities

to go unrecorded. This appears to be more pronounced in less developed countries. As England and

Folbre (2003) point out, economic literature tends to overlook women’s provision of care to other

people, often an important part of women’s lives and the well-being of the family and the society.

Also, measures of GDP, the dependent variable in many studies on factors affecting growth, include

only market transactions. Yet, home production activities in which women are the greatest source of

labor are critical to survival in subsistence economies. Most of the food produced in sub-Saharan

Africa, for example, is grown by women in small family plots and for use by the family. Because

relatively small amounts of their products are sold, and that mostly in local markets, women’s

production is undervalued or overlooked. Cash crops, which are more likely to be captured in

2
HDI measures the average condition of the people in the country. It incorporates measures of life
expectancy, educational attainment and the standard of living.

13
measures of GDP, tend to be controlled by men. It is estimated that 66% of female activities in

developing countries are not captured by national accounts compared with only 24% of male activities

being left unrecorded (UNDP, 1995:89). The effects of gender inequality on growth (or vice versa)

may be underestimated if reducing inequality promotes women’s activities that are not recorded in the

national accounts (Klasen, 1999).

Lack of theory
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to understanding the relationship between women’s work, gender

equality and growth is the lack of theory. Standard economics models assuming separate, self-

interested, autonomous and genderless agents are inadequate in modeling women’s economic

environment (restrictions, preferences, norms) and therefore their choices, especially in the less

developed countries. Women face different incentives than do men, and may have little freedom to

express them. In poor, traditional societies, women’s participation in traditional female work may not

be freely chosen.

Another critical question that theory might address is that of causation: Does improving the

status of women cause greater wealth, or is gender equality a consequence of economic development?

Or are there perhaps third factors behind them both? A problem in the empirical work on this issue is

the endogeneity of both income and inequality and their interdependence. Because so much time,

money, and political energy have gone into attempts to promote economic growth in poor countries, a

correct theoretical understanding of the direction of causality is of great practical consequence. Later

in this paper we will review a hypothesis of the relationship between development and family

dynamics by one of the authors of the present article (Miles 2005). She suggests that several of these

initiatives that Easterly records in his book, The Elusive Quest for Growth (2001) failed to affect

economic growth because the behaviors they were promoting are consequences, not causes, of

development This theory suggests that initiatives promoting gender equality or raising the status of

women will risk suffering the same fate, as historically gender equality in the developed world was the

result, not a cause, of economic growth.

14
 In the next two sections, we consider studies that look at the impact of gender equality on

growth separately from studies that look at the impact of growth on gender equality. We then present

an overview of Miles’ theory on the direction of causation.

5 Impact of gender equality on growth

Education of girls
In many empirical and theoretical studies, female to male ratio of education is used as the

measure of gender equality that is hypothesized to have an impact on economic growth and

development. This is probably partly due to the fact that comparable data on education is one of the

only measures available across countries. Education of girls is an important factor in understanding the

connections between the status of women, welfare of the family, the human capital available in a

society and future development. Many empirical studies conclude that increased schooling of the

mother is associated with larger effects on child health, schooling and adult productivity than increased

schooling of the father (see Schulz, 2001, for references). Even in the developed world, there is some

evidence that the mother’s education has a greater impact on children’s performance later in live than

the father’s3.

At the level of national economy, there is a strong positive correlation between countries’ per

capita GDP levels and gender equality measured by female to male years of schooling (see Lagerlöf,

2003). Even though it is difficult to identify the nature of the (inter)dependence between these

variables empirically, there are good reasons to believe that the actual levels of gender equality are not

an outcome of efficient economic choice. This inefficiency is suggested by the finding that gender

3
Korhonen (2004) finds that the time required to obtain a doctoral degree in economics is several years
shorter for those students whose mothers belonged to the better-educated half of the sample. It is
remarkable that mother’s education matters so strongly in his sample, which consisted of students who
had already finished their MA and started their doctoral studies, even after general abilities are
controlled for. The study uses survey data on the students who participated in the Finnish Post-graduate
Program in Economics, which is a nationwide program coordinating the doctoral studies in economics
in Finland. The data consists of 106 students who entered the doctoral program over the years 1991-
1999.

15
equality itself can be explained by religious variables, civil freedom and regional variables (see Dollar

and Gatti, 1999). In a growth model, a religious preference not to educate girls leads to a distortion that

prevents the efficient accumulation of human capital. Economy-wide gender biases are likely to

coexist with market failures, which further contribute to the under-investment in girls. Educational

resources will be misallocated. Parents tend not to invest resources in girls when the benefits go to

another family or if labor market discrimination, either in the form of lesser salaries or by direct

barriers to entry, makes a proper return on their investment unlikely.

Esteve-Volart (2000) models labor market discrimination in the form of barriers to entry as a

cause of both educational inequality and reduced growth. Gender inequality impacts growth by

reducing the pool of talented people whose ideas in turn lead to technological progress. The underlying

entrepreneurial talents of men and women are assumed to be evenly and identically distributed.

Discrimination is modeled by excluding women from the managerial positions, allowing them to be

only workers. As workers they may choose more primary education to increase their productivity. Any

further education does not benefit them because of the exclusion from managerial positions. This form

of gender bias leads to a fall in the average talent of managers, who are assumed to be the ones coming

up with good or bad ideas. The average quality of ideas in turn determines growth though

technological improvements. In comparison to the version of the model without discrimination,

discrimination implies lower female to male schooling ratios, lower wages for both men and women,

lower investment in human capital by both males and females, and reduced growth. Obviously, in a

world of this kind, increasing educational equality alone will not solve the problem.

Education and gender equality are associated with externalities and complementarities in the

society. Lagerlöf (2003) acknowledges the crucial importance of these externalities. He develops a

model that explains the European growth experience as an ultimate outcome of a gradual exogenous

improvement of educational equality over the past 2000 years. He abstracts from differences within

genders and intra-household allocation issues. It is assumed that parents care about their own

consumption, about the number of their children, and about the full income of the household into

which their children enter through marriage. Parents decide how much of their own human capital

16
(time used) to invest in the human capital of their sons and daughters, which in turn will determine

their children’s personal income. What matters though is not their child’s personal income, but the

total income of the child and his/her spouse. The model is shown to have many Nash equilibria

depending on the ratio of female to male human capital. If this ratio is low, any individual parent’s

optimal choice is to invest less in their daughter than in their son, as she is likely to marry a wealthier

husband in any case. Thus the economy coordinates on a low-gender-equality equilibrium. It is

assumed that the society over time re-coordinates on a more gender equal equilibria. Consequently, as

the ratio of female to male human capital in the society increases there will be a critical threshold after

which the economy moves to sustained growth. In the process, parents will shift from child quantity to

child quality, with first mortality and then fertility being reduced. The model captures the three

regimes of Galor and Weil (1999) of the population and income growth in Europe over the past

thousands of years. In this set up, we can expect movement towards gender equality alone to cause

economic growth, though possibly with a long lag.

Empirical studies on the effect of equality on growth

If the under-investment in girls is serious, it is reasonable that it might be visible in the macro

data. There are several cross country studies that specifically focus on the effects of gender inequality

on growth (for a summary see Lorgelly, 2000). The World Bank has produced research that

specifically focuses on the effects of gender equality on development and growth (Dollar and Gatti,

1999, Klasen, 1999).

For several reasons, it is difficult to disentangle whether gender equality is the cause or

consequence of growth. Both educational equality and growth could be driven by third factors, and it

is hard to find good instruments to solve the simultaneity problem. Another problem in estimating the

effect of gender inequality on growth concerns the timing of the effects. We did not find any work

estimating the time horizon in which improvements in women’s status or education might be expected

to affect growth in GNP. Most of the effects might be delayed for decades as it takes time until the

younger generations enter the labor markets. Also complications arise because of externalities that

17
education in general and specifically girls’ education has in the economy. Given the limited length of

available time series it is reasonable to consider the results of the empirical research with caution.

Klasen (1999) recognizes the importance of extending the time horizon over which the

changes in income are measured. He estimates a cross-section regression with 109 countries treating

the GDP growth over the period of 1960-1992 in country i as one observation. The estimated

regression could be rewritten as

y
( )i qi X ui
y

y
( ) i : average annual compounded rate of growth of GDP per capita 1960-1992.
y

q : measure of gender inequality

i

X: exogenous variables that affect growth

The explanatory variables measuring the gender inequality, q , are the female to male ratio of

total years of schooling in 1960 and the female to male ratio of the growth in total years of schooling

over the entire period, 1960-1992. Both are found to be significant in explaining growth. The growth

in schooling variable is likely to depend on the GDP growth over the same period. To check for the

robustness Klasen splits the sample into decades and uses only the female to male ratio of total years

of schooling at the beginning of the decade as the measure for qi . In another attempt to control for the

simultaneity, he instruments the growth in education variables by fertility rate in 1960, its growth and

government spending on education. Even after controlling for simultaneity in these alternative ways,

educational equality is found to be associated with higher consequent growth rate.

The explanatory variables, X, that are controlled for in these regressions, include the variables

typically used in cross country growth regressions (see Barro and others cited later): openness, initial

per capita income in 1960, and regional dummies as well as variables for average investment rates,

population growth and labor force growth over the entire period. To avoid multicollinearity problems

18
Klasen chooses variables measuring the overall human capital (included in X) and others measuring

the female to male ratio of human capital. The non-gender specific human capital variables are the

total years of schooling in 1960 and the annual growth in total years of schooling over the entire

period. Also the indirect effects of the gender inequality via population and labor force growth and

particularly via investment rates are found important both in size and significance.

Large portions of growth differences between different areas can be accounted for by the

gender differences. As an example of the magnitude consider the average annual growth difference

between Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia and the Pacific from 1960 to 1992. The annual growth in

per capita incomes averaged only 0.7% in Sub-Saharan Africa which was 3.5% slower than in East

Asia and the Pacific. According to the estimation results 0.45% of this annual growth difference of

3.5% can be accounted for by differences in gender inequality in education. Inequality in education

appears to matter more in Africa than elsewhere. Klasen additionally confirms that the fertility rate is

particularly affected by the inequality in education rather than by the average education.

In another study Dollar and Gatti (1999) estimate not only the effect of gender inequality on

growth but also the determination of gender inequality across countries and over time. They use panel

data on 127 countries in four 5-year periods over 1975-1990. The estimated equations for the growth

and gender inequality are respectively:

(3) y
( ) q it u it
y it

(4) q 1
y y2
2 it
Z
it it it

y
( ) : per capita income growth, over the 5-year periods
it
y

Z: exogenous variables that affect gender inequality. q and X are defined previously.
it

Gender equality is measured by the female secondary school attainment (the % of female

population over 25 years for whom secondary school is the highest level of attainment). Corresponding

19
male variables are included in the regression rather than using the ratio of female to male education

directly.

To estimate the effect of gender equality on growth (regression 3), the familiar variables from

Barro and Lee (1994) are used as explanatory variables (X): level (and square) of initial per capita

income, black market premium, the rule of law, revolutions, regional dummies, life expectancy and

fertility. To address the endogeneity of gender differentials (qit ) they use religion variables and civil

liberties as instruments for the measure of gender inequality (the male and female educational

attainment) in the 2SLS growth regressions. Women’s education is also likely to increase growth

through reducing fertility, which is controlled for, and the focus is on the direct effect of inequality on

growth. The effect of female secondary school education on growth is found significant particularly in

the more developed countries: 1 percentage point increase in the share of adult women with secondary

school education implies 0.3 percentage point increase in per capita income growth.

Dollar and Gatti also estimate the effect of income on gender equality (the latter equation).

The corresponding male variables are again controlled for in the regressions. The other variables in Z

measure civil liberties, religion and regional factors. Again recognizing the problem of endogeneity

among the variables, the results show a convex relationship between income and gender equality. A

causal relationship appears likely: Increases in income lead to more gender equality in education. Due

to convexity, this effect is minor for countries with lower middle incomes or less, with the effect

becoming larger as countries move to higher incomes. The convex relationship between per capita

income and secondary education is visible even when looking at the data plots of country incomes and

secondary attainments by gender: Convexity is sharper for women. The results remain similar for other

measures of equality like women’s economic equality under the law and women in parliament.

Women’s rights in marriage on the other hand do not seem to be associated with income.

20
Do democratization and religion have an impact through education?

Robert Barro’s discussion in his empirical growth studies highlight the various ways in which

gender equality possibly interacts with development through issues like democracy and religion.

Women’s education appears in a puzzling manner in these studies (Barro, 1996, 1997, 1999a; Barro

and Lee, 1994, and Barro and Sala-i-Martin, 1995, p. 424): The level of female education at the

beginning of the decade seems to have either negative or insignificant effect on subsequent growth,

while the male educational attainment has a positive effect to growth rates (for sensitivity analysis see

Lorgelly and Owen, 1999)4.

Barro (1997) interprets this by pointing out that female schooling is important for growth

through reducing fertility, which is already an explanatory variable in the regressions. The effects of

women’s schooling and status may already be included in other indicators of economic development

like political freedoms, which are frequently included in the growth regressions. When the reverse

channel from economic development to democracy (as measured by electoral rights and civil liberties

indexes) is studied, a somewhat surprising result emerges. As opposed to direct growth regressions, the

gap between male and female primary schooling now has a negative and significant effect on both

indexes (Barro, 1999b). This significance does not disappear if other measures of educational and

income inequality are included. It is noticeable that it is specifically early schooling that matters for

democratization, whereas in the growth regressions secondary schooling is the significant variable.

Barro himself explains his findings by suggesting that the effects of the status and schooling of

women on growth is hidden behind the other variables like fertility and indices measuring democracy.

He states, “Perhaps more promising is the idea, reminiscent of Tocqueville (1835), that expanded

educational opportunity for females goes along with a social structure that is generally more

participatory and, hence, more receptive to democracy” (1999b, p.167).

4
Education is measured in the decadal growth regressions by average years of secondary and higher
school attainment for males and females aged 25 and over and by life expectancy. Additional
explanatory variables include typically rule of law indices, democracy index, and variables on
government consumption and terms of trade.

21
 There also seems to be a relation between country’s primary religious affiliation and

democracy, with Protestant countries being almost always democratic whereas Muslim countries are

usually not. Barro suggests that the main effects of religion work through variables like the gap

between male and female education. This idea gets more recent confirmation from the study by Guiso,

Sapienza and Zingales (2002). They use World Value Survey data, covering 66 countries from 1981-

1997, to study the association kmgof religion and economic attitudes. Actively religious people are

found to be more intolerant and less sympathetic to women’s rights than people who do not belong to

any religion or are not actively attending religious meetings. This holds in the major religious

denominations (Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Buddhists). Survey questions

include: When jobs are scarce, should men have more right to a job than women? Do you think that

women should have children in order to be fulfilled, or is this not necessary? A university education is

more important for a boy than for a girl?

The association of religiosity and a negative attitude toward women’s education and market

work is particularly strong within Islam.

Overall the estimation results are plagued with endogeneity problems that make it impossible

to make final conclusions as to whether gender equality can be a cause of growth. However, the

various estimation results are compatible with the possibility of large positive externalities in the

society associated with women’s education. If this is the case, the policies targeting women’s

education may be justified, ultimately even if one is concerned only about the instrumental effects of

gender equality in promoting economic development and growth.

6 Impact of increased economic resources on gender equality

Allocation of resources and power within the household

Economic development contributes to gender equality in itself as the households have more

resources available. There is less economic pressure to discriminate against women or girls who tend

to do worse in the resource allocation under conditions of poverty (Ray, 1996). Empirical evidence

22
indicates that if women, instead of men in the same household, gain more economic resources, there

will be movement towards women’s empowerment and equality. Increased economic resources of

women within the family have been shown to lead to children’s, particularly girl children’s, better

education. This evidence has accumulated partly in response to the implications of the so-called

unitary model of family economics as initiated by Gary Becker5.

Becker’s model implies perfect-pooling of the household resources between the spouses

whereby consumption allocations are not influenced by consideration of who earned the income or

owns the economic resources. Thus the model abstracts away issues of power and individual self-

interest: the altruist head of the family has the utility of the wife included within his utility function.

Thus one of the key issues concerning the status of women – allocation of resources and power within

the family – are abstracted away. This is a curious simplification considering that economics in

general is all about self-interested individuals making choices under scarcity. Becker’s model leads to

extreme specialization of women into the home-sphere. It can be an outcome resulting from even tiny

discriminations in the job market, from biological differences, or from comparative advantage in child

rearing. It is efficient for the wife to specialize in low paying jobs or unpaid homework.

In the 1990s both the theoretical and empirical literature challenged the Beckerian view of the

family, as the perfect-pooling implication seemed implausible. The mounting evidence from both

developing and developed countries has shown that when given the opportunity, men and women use

the family budget differently. An illuminating natural experiment occurred in the UK in the late 70’s

when a policy shift transferred government-provided child allowances from husbands to wives.

Lundberg, Pollak and Wales (1996) found strong evidence that this resulted in a shift from the

purchase of men’s to women’s and children’s clothing. Work in African data has likewise shown that

income from “male crops” is used differently from income from “female crops” (see Duflo and Udry,

2003, for references).

Other studies using developing country data indicate that the allocations of resources between

spouses in productive activities are not efficient. Udry (1996) estimates that about six percent of output

5
See A Treatise on the Family (1991) by Gary S. Becker for a recent exposition.

23
in agricultural production in Burkina Faso is lost because of inefficient factor allocation within the

household: Plots controlled by women are farmed much less intensively than similar plots controlled

by men. Duflo and Udry (2003), using data from Côte D’Ivoire, find that rainfall shocks on different

categories of crops (male controlled, female controlled, or those whose returns are customarily used

for joint family consumption) indeed are associated with expenditure shifts within the family. Family

members are apparently not insuring each other even against short term variations in individual

income. The hypothesis of complete insurance within households is thus rejected.

To address decision making within the family, the unitary model has been challenged in the

theoretical front as well. One alternative has been to model marriage as a cooperative bargaining game,

where outcomes remain efficient (see Lundberg and Pollak, 1996, for a review). The household unit

benefits from various kinds of joint production and scale economies. At issue is now how these

benefits will be distributed. Spouses negotiate over the distribution within the family, with the

bargaining distribution being dependent on each spouse’s outside options. Divorce is the threat point in

some models. Using such a model, McElroy and Horney (1981) find that policies improving the status

of divorced women shift resources to wives within the marriage. Other models have an internal threat

point, a non-cooperative equilibrium, under which the marital responsibilities in the provision of

public goods will be allocated according to social norms rather than preferences or productivity

differences. In this setup, the policies reallocating income within marriage will change the distribution

within the family regardless of post divorce well-being (see Lundberg and Pollak, 1993). The more

general “collective” model developed by Chiappori assumes efficient outcomes while individuals are

free to bargain over the household allocation. The collective model encompasses the cooperative

models as well as Becker’s model as a special case (see e.g. Browning and Chiappori, 1998).

Some evidence for the bargaining scenario comes from looking at dowry as a means of

transferring wealth intergenerationally to the daughter. Zhang and Chan (1999) point out that in

Taiwan dowry is considered formally as the wife’s property, even in divorce. Thus, dowry not only

increases the available resources in the new family, but also enhances the bride’s bargaining position

within the marriage. Using Taiwanese micro data, they show that a larger dowry increases the wife’s

24
welfare as measured by the extent of the husband’s help with household chores. Bride price, which is

paid to the parents of the bride, not to the bride or to the couple themselves, does not have a similar

effect.

Interesting insights on how the status of women is associated with dowry and bride price

practices come from the work of Botticini and Siow (2003) and Luke and Munshi (2003). The former

paper reviews historical evidence over thousands of years in different civilizations. It is observed that

dowries occur primarily in monogamous societies, where married daughters leave their parental home

and sons take over the family business. The authors suggest that altruist parents assign large dowries to

their daughters while allowing sons to inherit property after their deaths. This is to mitigate the free-

riding problem between the siblings. The role of dowries becomes less important as labor markets

develop. In contrast, bride price is practiced where polygyny is permitted and practiced. An

explanation for the differing practices is found in the relative scarcity of land and labor. In Africa,

labor was traditionally the scarce resource. Women did most of the farming, and consequently were

valued for both their productive and reproductive capabilities. This is suggested to have given rise to

bride price, a payment to the bride’s parents in return for their provision of a valuable resource. In

Eurasia, where land was in short supply, women were primarily valued for their reproductive ability,

not as a source of labor, and a dowry system was common (see Luke and Munshi, 2003, for

references).

These two systems imply radically different statuses for women. In the African system,

divorce typically leaves the woman with nothing. The husband keeps the children, and the wife’s

family must return the bride-price. Under these circumstances, the woman has little bargaining power

and no way to deter extra-marital sexual activity on the part of her husband. Luke and Munshi (2003)

use survey data from a sample of migrants in Kenya, and find that marriage has no effect on male

extra-marital sexual activity once the selective entry into marriage is accounted for. Forty-five percent

of the married men reported extra-marital partners in the past year. The comparable figure for extra-

marital relations in the U.S. is five percent, while the sexual activity of single men was similar in both

Kenya and the U.S. Luke and Munshi state cautiously: ‘A negative externality is quite possibly

25
associated with sexual activity involving multiple partners in this high HIV area, but social norms

restricting such activity are yet to emerge.’ In this environment where 80% of HIV transmission occurs

through heterosexual activity and a substantial proportion of the population is infected, women’s

restricted inheritance leaves them in a very vulnerable position economically.

It is difficult to disentangle the separate roles of personal versus family wealth, income and

cultural norms and practices on gender equality. The study of Luke and Munshi (2005) gives an

interesting insight into their respective power in maintaining the status quo in India. The setting for

the survey is in a Southern Indian area that British planters converted into huge tea plantations in the

late 19th century. These plantations hired both the former slaves (the lowest caste) and the higher

castes. Today the third generation of these men and women work on these plantations. The unique

experiment arises from the fact that wages for plucking the tea leaves, a female job, are set by the

government. Both the low and high castes earn the same and receive the same education, sanitary

facilities, and accommodation. They differ primarily in the status of their caste networks in their

ancestral location. Although women do more repetitious work they earn more than their husbands.

Women seem to be using the bargaining power that the increased income gives them. In low caste

families female income especially increases the education of girls and reduces the likelihood of

sending the offspring to a secondary school in the ancestral location. It is in women’s interest to keep a

distance from the low caste family networks and invest in the modern economy which is more caste

and gender neutral. High caste women, on the other hand, do not have the same incentives. They are

more prone to hold on to family ties, which offer higher quality networks for them than for the lower

caste women. They are less educated and don’t earn more than their lower caste sisters. Under these

circumstances it is not surprising that the preference and power conflict between household members

is more apparent in lower caste families where women have been traditionally in a worse position, as

evidenced in the increased incidence of domestic violence in low caste households where women earn

more. Luke and Munshi suggest that historically disadvantaged groups and, in particular,

disadvantaged individuals within those groups, may in fact be most responsive to the new economic

26
opportunities afforded by globalization when the income constraints that restrict their choices are

relaxed.

Outside provision of economic resources

The above results hint that economic opportunities have the potential to break even the most deeply

ingrained cultural practices keeping women in subordinate positions. This was the insight of the

founder of Grameen bank, Muhammed Yunus. He started out to provide small loans for women to

start a business of their own (Morduch, 1999). The success of the micro credit concept points to

economic consequences of women’s restricted opportunities. Given the opportunity, even a poor,

uneducated woman, can run a business of her own.

An example of the many organizations aiming to raise the economic status of women through

micro credits is ASA (Activists for Social Alternatives) with about 60,000 poor and often illiterate

female members. ASA undertook a three-year panel study on the effectiveness of their micro credit

programs in India. A random sample of participants was asked to use pictorial diaries to record their

economic activities. The outcomes for long-term members were compared with the outcomes for those

who had participated for less than two years. The comparisons show that over time, women receiving

micro-credit loans participated more in household decision-making and were more likely to own real

property alone or jointly with their husbands. Long-term members were also more physically mobile,

visiting government institutions and speaking out more in public meetings. Compared to short term

members, their children had a higher rate of school attendance and greater gender equity. On the

negative side, over time loans were increasingly used for consumption and male productive activities,

while less investment went to woman’s productive activities. Overall, however, the microfinance

program and the pictorial diary, which seems to function as an empowerment tool in itself, 6 led to

6
Helzi Noponen (2003) developed this method for evaluating the success of the micro credit programs
for several large Indian NGOs. A key tool in this method, the ILS (Internal Learning System) is a
pictorial diary, designed for use among illiterate populations. The diary is designed to help its users
analyze their livelihood situation, so that they can make strategic decisions about the use of scarce
resources available to them. For example, the diary has a picture of a tree where the roots describe the
different sources of funds and resources. One side of the trunk has a female face, the other a male face,
and the branches describe the uses of the incomes. A user might draw a line from an agricultural activity

27
improved livelihood, living conditions and consumption standards for women, as well as improved

social status and treatment in home and the community.

This overall picture of the role of microfinance in women’s empowerment is in harmony with

the results of a study by Pitt and Khandker in Bangladesh (1998). They use a careful quasi-

experimental household survey designed to study the impact of participation in micro-finance, by

gender, on labor supply, schooling, household expenditures and assets in Bangladeshi villages. Micro-

credit taken by the woman rather than the man of the household was found to increase women’s non-

land assets and children’s education. Household expenditures increased by twice the amount that they

would have had the credit been given to the husband. Men were found to reduce their labor supply if

they received the micro-credit, while if the loan was taken by the woman her labor supply increased

(although the man’s labor supply was reduced in this case as well). These results appeared

considerably larger and more significant for those who participated in the Grameen Bank program,

which was designed specifically to aid women. 7

One key to the success of micro-credit programs in Islamic cultures, which encourage the

seclusion of women, was the recognition that for Islamic women self-employment activities at home

(while attending to the children) were more culturally acceptable than projects that involved working

outside. These programs also discovered that project design that allowed women to deal with the

often-male program organizer as a group rather than individually were more likely to be accepted.

Currently, 95 percent of the clients of the Grameen bank are women. Globally 75-80% of the micro

credits are given to women (Armendariz de Aghion and Morduch, 2005).

Armendariz de Aghion and Morduch point out that group lending and peer borrowing deter

domestic violence. By giving women a way to keep money away from their husbands, these programs

also allow women to save. In poor households rising incomes tend to lead to diminishing conflict

on the woman’s side to a male branch denoting alcohol consumption. The diary also has ‘dream plots’
picturing different possible situations, where the woman again marks her current situation while seeing
the path to the better future. The women use the diary as to tool to communicate their situation to the
authorities and to request resources. They also use it to share successes and problems.
7
Muhammad Yunus, an economics professor, recognized the importance of women in development, but
it took 3 years from the beginning of the Grameen Bank in 1983 to increase the share of women in the
program from 44 per cent to 75 per cent (see Armendariz de Aghion and Morduch, 2005, for the
history).

28
between the husbands and wives. From the banks’ perspective, women – being less mobile, more

fearful of social sanctions, and more risk-averse – make good clients because they are better at

repaying the loans. Their lesser mobility also makes monitoring of the loans easier.

7 Political consequences of empowering women

Promoting women’s broader participation in society is seen as a priority in efforts to reduce

poverty in policy circles. The UNDP and the World Bank see women’s empowerment as a critical

issue (UNDP, 2003b). In the mainstream academic literature women’s decision making power has

typically been a marginal issue (see discussion in Kanbur 2002). This has partially to do with the

prominent role that the Becker’s unitary model used to have in family economics. Becker’s model

implies that if women were given power to decide at the level of the society, they would make the

same decisions as men, since both genders would equally maximize the income of the household unit. 8

The literature on household bargaining (see Katz, 1997; Lundberg and Pollak, 1993, 1996, 2003;

Pollak, 1994) arises from recognition of the importance of who holds power within household. Indeed

Kanbur argues for inequality of power as being the fundamental inequality associated with lower

female achievements. For Amartya Sen (1999) freedom to make decisions is not only development in

itself but also a necessary requirement for economic growth. More immediately power issues arise in

development studies where case studies and empirical observations are used (e.g. Agarwal, 2001; Roy

and Tisdell, 2002). In this context, the hindrance to development due to patriarchal property rights is

particularly tangible (see Braunstein and Folbre, 2001; Agarwal, 1994). Even when the issue of power

is not directly discussed, the inadequacy of the standard models is increasingly acknowledged and

alternative models sought (e.g. Duflo and Udry, 2003).

Empirical evidence indicates that women as political decision makers make different choices

than do men. Chattopadhya and Duflo (2001) collected a particularly interesting data set on 165

8
Additionally, there is lack of gender specific data and conceptual problems in considering intra-
household consumption, incomes and decision-making as well as difficulties in measuring the
‘largeness’ of the gender inequalities in comparison to other inequalities. Gender has two categories
while other inequalities are measured in many categories, which makes comparison of the magnitude of
the issues misleading.

29
village councils in West Bengal in India. These village councils are responsible for the provision of

many local public goods. In 1998, one third of all leadership positions of the village councils were

randomly assigned to women. They found that women invested more in infrastructure relevant to

them, such as water, fuel and roads, while men, who have greater access to good-paying jobs, invested

more in education. Women make different decisions as legislators in the developed world as well (see

Thomas, 1991). In U.S. presidential elections there has been a consistent gender gap of roughly 15

points over the past 20 years, with women voting more for the Democrats. Lott and Kenny (1999)

show that the women’s suffrage in the US around 1920 had a significant positive impact on the size of

the state government expenditures and revenues. The fact that female suffrage was achieved in

different years in different states, in some states involuntarily and in others voluntarily, allows the

researchers to address the issues of causality. The most natural explanation given for this gap follows

from the lower incomes of women and the uncertainty that comes from women’s specialization in

domestic skills that is not rewarded in case of divorce. Thus women benefit more from various

government programs and vote for the candidates more likely to promote them. The gender gap has

increased since the 1970’s in the U.S. and in Europe.

Evidence collected by Edlund and Pande (2002, 2003) explain this widening gap by the

decline in marriage (i.e. single parenthood, out-of-wedlock fertility and divorce). If marriage transfers

resources from men to women, then the decline in marriage makes men richer and women poorer.

Both the increased social prevalence of divorce and the actual experience of divorce are shown to

make women turn towards the left in the U.S. and in Europe. Both men’s and women’s political

preferences are affected in a way that increases the gender gap. Edlund and Pande also suggest reasons

for the decline of marriage: If you consider marriage a contract where women provide sex and

children, then the availability of low cost female-controlled contraceptives and legalization of abortion

may have led to reduced transfers from men to women in marriage. On the other hand, if the man’s

role in the marriage is to be the provider, then women’s greater labor force participation and earnings

would lead to a decline in their interest in matrimony.

30
 How women’s levels of discretion and power at the level of the society affect aggregate

growth is unclear, but it is evident that women’s decision making power is associated with economic

outcomes. In a cross section of countries, it has been found that higher rate of female participation in

government is associated with lower levels of corruption (Dollar et al., 2001). In another study Indian

villagers are found to be less likely to pay bribes in those villages randomly reserved to women leaders

(Dulfo and Topalova, 2004). If women’s presence in public organizations is associated with reduced

corruption, this would certainly be a factor worth considering in the pursuit of growth and

development. The reasons for this association are harder to explain. Dollar et al.’s report work on

gender differences implyingimplies that women are less willing to sacrifice the common good for

personal (material) gain. Torgler and Valev (2006) investigate the gender differences in the citizens’

perception of the justifiability of corruption or tax evasion. They find that women are significantly less

likely than men to agree that corruption and cheating on taxes can be justified. This holds after

controlling for ‘life-course’ explanations like age, education, marriage, employment and economic

situation. As a practical application, Mexico and Peru have increased the number of women police

officers to reduce corruption (see Torgler and Valev for references and discussion on criminology

literature).

These studies raise the question of whether women are really more likely than men to consider

the common good. Are they ethically superior? It is possible to think of alternative interpretations. It

could be that social norms and group expectations for women are different from those of men’s,

leading to different personal ethics. In the literature on tax ethics and tax compliance, there is

evidence that the causality can go from group expectations to personal ethics: Wenzel (2004) finds that

ethical concerns related to paying taxes are based on the internalized social norms of one’s reference

group. In his case the reference group was Australian citizens. Perceived social norms affected

personal tax ethics when there was a strong personal identification to the Australian community. It

may be that women’s identification with other women, and the associated social norms that women

should consider the common good, could drive the findings on the association between less corruption

and women’s participation in decision making. Alternatively, women’s presence may lead to less

31
corruption amongst male decision makers. In India, women are less likely to be corrupt and

appear to be at least as effective leaders using observable measures on the quality of public services.

Nonetheless their performance is judged to be worse than that of men and they are not likely to be re-

elected (Duflo and Topalova, 2004).

It is interesting to note that China, India and Korea, countries that have pursued active and

successful government policies to further development over the past fifty years, have all seen the need

to actively address women’s role in their countries’ development. Gupta et al. (2000) report the very

varied policies and the different motivations behind them.

8 Technological change behind development and gender

equality

We began by noting that the lack of resources and opportunities available to women is

strongly associated with society-wide poverty or lack of development. The studies we have surveyed

so far highlight the interdependence of gender equality and economic development from varied

perspectives. However, this work does not allow us to draw any clear cut conclusions about the

direction of causality. Carrie Miles (2005, 2007) presents a hypothesis which includes an explanation

of causation between development and several aspects of women’s status, including education,

birthrates, and power within the household and in society at large. Her explanation provides a

framework for better understanding some of the findings presented above.

The central observation on which her hypothesis is based is the fact that the provision of rights

to women is a relatively late development in human history, even in developed countries. She asks

what has caused the women’s roles to change so dramatically over the past century in United States

and Western Europe.

32
 Miles’s explanation is a technological one. She begins with Becker’s explanation for the

sexual division of labor9. Before the development of modern production technology, households,

particularly farming households, were on many levels self-sufficient entities requiring a great deal of

labor to meet even basic needs. In these autarkic household economies children served as a valuable

input to production. For these ‘technological’ reasons fertility was high, and couples often had more

children than they really “wanted” in a modern sense because they needed the labor. Becker writes that

under these conditions, women specialized in the child bearing and in those production activities that

could be undertaken simultaneously with pregnancy, nursing, or child care. Men specialized in what

was left over, that is, the work that women could not easily do with children present. While Becker’s

argument on the impact of domestic specialization explains intra-family power hierarchies, Miles

points out that because much market activity, the military, and politics were literally “none of

women’s business,” the subordination of women extends to virtually all arenas of life – a

circumstance usually known as “patriarchy”.

Miles traces the movement toward gender equality in the developed world to technological

advances that destroyed the economic reasons for the sexual division of labor. The Industrial

Revolution (usually dated to about 1800) was the beginning of a complete change in the autarkic and

patriarchal household economy. Domestic production became slowly obsolete as technological

advances made it more efficient for families to purchase consumption goods rather than make them at

home (Cowan 1983). As this development progressed, much of the work performed by men and

children left the home. As children lost their value as direct inputs to production and instead began to

require expensive education in order to compete in the changing marketplace, fertility dropped

dramatically. Miles notes that between the decline in the value of children and the continual

technological progress that offered more and more market alternatives to home production, sometime

mid-twentieth century it became inefficient for most women to remain out of the paid labor force as

well, changing the role of women on nearly all levels. Specialization within the autarkic household

9
A Treatise on the Family, chapter 2.

33
economy became specialization at the market place, and the former sexual division of labor was no

longer natural or necessary. Miles sees these technological changes as a cause for the feminism: With

far less productive work that could be done at home, women took on new role in the economy and its

related institutions.

This understanding of the role of household production offers a new and different way of

looking at development. Recognizing that a developed economy is one in which production takes

place outside of the household explains the strong correlations between societal wealth and increased

education, population control, increased employment of women outside of the home, the shift in

demand for quality versus quantity in children, and increased gender equality. The causation,

however, runs from growth to the latter factors, not the other way around. This view of causation is in

accordance with the findings of Dollar and Gatti (1999) that increases in income lead to less gender

inequality in education. This explains why programs undertaken by the World Bank and other

agencies to educate the population, decrease the birthrate, or to educate girls in order to decrease the

birthrate, have had little impact on economic growth (as observed by Easterly, 2001, pp 71-85). If

development is associated with the movement of production out of the household, development will

result in both a falling birthrate and the requirement that productive workers, male and female, be

educated. If current developing countries were to follow the western process of attaining gender

equality, it would be growth that creates a demand for more education and fewer children and

(eventually) a reason for gender equality.

The above view is in accordance with the empirical work documenting the failure of

educational programs to stimulate economic growth in developing countries (Easterly, 2001).

Nevertheless, less-developed countries with a relatively well-educated populace, such as South Korea

before its development boom, are in a better position to adopt modern technology when the

opportunities present themselves. These opportunities in turn demand more educated workers.

Education thus emerges as a necessary but not sufficient factor for economic growth. Similarly, as

gender equality allows both halves of the population to contribute to modern production, greater

equality may be caused by the economic growth it fueled. As in the case of education, less-developed

34
countries with relatively liberal/less restrictive attitudes towards women will arguably also be in a

better position to take advantage of opportunities for growth, and that growth will further the rights

accorded women. 10

Technological progress can be understood as a cause or catalyst for the gradual but dramatic

development in western societies over the past 200 years: drastically declining fertility, children

becoming rather consumption than production goods, women’s economic liberation, the collapse of

patriarchy and the overall increase in social welfare in developed countries. Greenwood et al. (2005b)

make a similar point in their paper, ‘Engines of Liberation’. They attribute the liberation of women

from the home to the labor saving household technologies that were developed after the invention of

electricity: Meal preparation, laundry and cleaning took 58 hours a week in the US in 1900 as

compared to 18 hours 75 years later. In Sweden, Svensson (2006) estimates that the time savings in

cooking, heating, and cleaning alone because of the introduction of new household appliances over the

1900s accounted for a minimum of 12 hours per week. This is not counting the impact on time saving

because of the goods that were bought on the market rather than produced at home.

How does this long term development fit with the “baby boom” that temporarily interrupted

the declining trend in fertility in the 1940s -60s? This boom in fertility is often attributed to pent-up

demand for marriage and children following World War II. Greenwood et al. (2005a) acknowledge

that the boom took place also in countries that were not involved in the war and notice that the 1940s-

60s was exactly the time when the new household technology became commonplace. They thus model

the post WWII fertility boom by the improved household technology which reduced the cost of

children and household work. At the same time, women were beginning to move to the labor market,

but the labor market was not yet open to most of them. Based on Miles’s theory, we could hypothesize

that this was exactly the period during which children started to serve as consumption goods, perhaps

for the first time in history. Radically improved household technology may indeed have been part of

the story behind the temporary increase in fertility. Interestingly, fertility of the working women, who

were a minority of all women, increased the most during the baby boom period. Even today fertility is

10
An observation that suggests that countries dominated by religious influences that require the
seclusion of women will experience slower growth.

35
higher in those European countries where women are actively participating at the labor market (Nordic

countries) than in the countries where they are commonly housewives (Southern Europe). However,

the baby boom turned into the baby bust and the trend decline in fertility continued in the 60s

simultaneously as the last of the productive activities left the household. 11 Even married women

entered labor markets in large numbers. Greenwood (2005a) study, like much of economics literature,

looks at the children as consumption goods focusing on the opportunity cost of women in household,

childrearing work versus market place. This storyline remains silent of the longer term trend whereby

the productive role of children disappeared as a motivation for fertility decisions. This could be a

reason why Greenwood et al. are not able to account for the extent of the baby bust after the boom. In

order to understand the longer term trend of falling fertility rates in the developed countries, we must

acknowledge the fundamental change in the role of children. Miles posits that their role has changed

from production inputs under economic poverty to serving parents’ utility more directly or at an

emotional or social level. Indeed, Miles views the motive for marriage shifting from the economic

need for sexual complementarity to demands for personal fulfillment, at the same time and for the

same reasons. This change has occurred over time as production gradually moved out of the

households, and the marketplace, not-for-profit agencies such as hospitals and nursing homes, and

governments replaced the services once provided by the family (Miles, 2006). A declining birthrate is

being observed among the elites in now-developing countries, while such a decline is more

problematic among the rural poor, who face a world in which superior technologies are already

invented but often not available (Miles 2007).

11
This is not to say that there is not still a great deal of work to be done in the household, especially
when there are young children present. However, few households today actually produce the items they
consume – items such as fruits, vegetables, grains, meat, milk, fabric for clothing, home sewn clothing,
heat, nursing care, education, all of which were produced in the home in the recent past -- and virtually
none produce items for sale, as was typical in the 19th century.

36
9 Achieving gender equality: Challenges and Cures

As we have noted earlier, whether or not gender equality causes growth or economic

development, gender equality along with other forms of civil rights has become a goal in itself. It can

also be considered as development in itself (Sen 1999). The following literature considers some of the

obstacles in achieving it.

Identity and self-perpetuating subordination

The exact characteristics of hierarchical gender valuations differ across countries, but there is

not doubt that hierarchy itself exists to different degrees in most (one might argue, to some extent, in

all) cultures. Its existence can be more vividly seen when looking at cultures in which practices differ

from our own. 12 The appearance of patriarchy differs in Africa from the form of patriarchy in Muslim

countries or Asia (Kandiyoti, 2002). Generally, gender hierarchy is not necessarily implied by gender

specific specialization, but rather by the restricted opportunities and restricted perspectives for the

future that this specialization typically carries with it. This specialization or role might be culturally

prescribed, or taken on by individuals freely. The following quote from Amartya Sen offers a

perspective on the dynamics by which the hierarchical gender valuations may interact with economics:

The insecure sharecropper, the exploited landless laborer, the overworked domestic servant,
the subordinate housewife, may all come to terms with their predicament in such a way that grievance
and discontent are submerged in cheerful endurance by the necessity of uneventful survival. The
hopeless underdog loses the courage to desire a better deal and learns to take pleasure in small
mercies.

Sen also introduced the idea of capabilities: “If we do not have the courage to choose to live in a

particular way, even though we could live that way if we so choose, can it be said that we do not have

freedom to live that way, i.e., the corresponding capability?” (Sen, 1984/1993, – taken from

UNIFEM, 2000). Ester Duflo (2005) suggests that economic development alone is insufficient to

12
Muslims for example, perceive women in the US to have low status, while Americans perceive
women in Muslim countries to have low status. Both sets of perceptions are based on differing
expectations of how much of a woman’s body should be naked or covered. Sexual exploitation and
violence is common, if not much talked about, in both countries (Franks, 2003).

37
significantly increase women’s ability to make decisions because of the pervasive stereotypes against

women’s ability. She cites research by psychologists showing the power of the so-called ‘stereotype

threat’, which makes women believe that they are just not as good as men in particular tasks. Spencer

et al. (1999) showed that the fact that female students had internalized the stereotype that they were

less able than men made them perform less well than male students in a test situation. If the test was

started by stating that, “You may have heard that girls are less good than boys at math, but this is not

true for this particular test”, the girls did as well as boys in the same test. Discrediting the stereotype

affected performance immediately.

A model proposed by Akerlof and Kranton (2000) provides an explanation of how gender

hierarchy sustains itself. They introduce identity into economic analysis as a factor that substantially

changes previous analyses. Identity – a person’s sense of self – is incorporated into the utility function

as a motivation for behavior, and a simple game-theoretic model is adapted to gender discrimination

and social exclusion. Identity is based on social categories C. Each person j has an assignment of

other people and himself into these categories cj: men and women in our case. The hierarchy story of

the current paper fits directly with the Akerlof-Kranton’s idea that the category and associated self-

image for women carries a lower social status. Prescriptions P indicate the appropriate behavior for

men and women in different situations. They may also describe an ideal for each gender in terms of

physical characteristics and other attributes. The utility function for person j incorporates j’s identity, Ij

, along with the usual vectors of j’s actions, aj, and others’ actions, a-j as follows

(1) Uj U j (a j , a j , I j )

Person j’s identity is represented as follows:

(2) Ij I j (a j , a j ; c j , j , P)

Person’s social status depends on the j’s assigned social category, cj. A person assigned a category

with higher social status may enjoy a higher self-image. Function Ij(.) gives the social status of a

category. Identity also depends on the extent to which j’s own characteristics j match those assigned

to her/his own gender prescriptions P. Finally, identity depends on how well the person’s own actions

38
and others’ actions correspond to the prescribed behavior, P. For example, a woman working in a

“male” profession breaks the prescriptions for both men and women. Men’s identity in the profession

may be negatively affected to some degree, but the woman’s identity is in conflict.

In the simplest case the individual j chooses actions to maximize utility (1) taking as given

c j , j , P and the actions of others. As in standard utility theory, people may not consciously realize

they are maximizing this utility function. Given the complexity with which hierarchical gender

prescriptions, individual characteristics, and economic actions interact and enter through identities into

the utility functions, it is easy to see why there are difficulties in understanding the reasons for

women’s lower status from looking at economic data alone.

That women internalize these identity prescriptions and the status that goes with them can be

seen in women’s support of behaviors that sustain hierarchical gender valuations, even when such

activities or attitudes harm them as a group. The results of Ben-Ner, Kong and Putterman (2004)

dictator game experiment provides one such example. In this experiment, women and men are given

100 dollars to be split with a completely unknown person or a person of known gender. Women

systematically gave less money to women than to men or to persons of unknown gender. Gender

information did not affect men’s giving. Crocker (1999) reviews literature on social stigma and self-

esteem and arrives at more positive perspectives on the possibilities of countering the stereotypes of

women’s lesser value. She considers self-worth as something that depends on the shared meanings that

people bring with them to the situations. Features of the situation may make the stereotypes irrelevant

for the self-esteem. This is what happened for the student’s in the math exam when the stereotype was

made situationally irrelevant. It was an internalization that was instantly changed. If this is true about

gender valuations more widely, it opens up possibilities for even quick changes in them.

Do the changing identities explain the historical experience of the now developed country

women and changes in their labor market position? Why was change so slow if identities can change

quickly in changing situations? Goldin (2006) gives an interesting perspective to this. She points out

that only in the 70s or late 60s were young women able to predict what their life time employment

would be. Even though many of the women of the previous generation were in the labor force most of

39
their lives, they could not have anticipated it at the time when they made their schooling decisions.

Young women of the 70s were the first to be able to plan for a lifetime career and to form their

identities before marriage. They naturally invested more in education and work experience. This

explains why the increase in women’s earnings relative to men’s occurred only over the past two

decades even though the labor force participation rates were high earlier. The altered identities were

behind what she calls the ‘quiet revolution’ that took place over this time period.

In developing countries, governments in the past have been aware of the power of the

stereotypes and patriarchal kinship structures when they are intertwined with economics. One of the

strongest forces maintaining the hierarchical gender structures are the patrilineal inheritance rules

whereby the productive assets are passed on through the male lineage. Concomitant with women’s

movement to the husband’s locality in marriage is a lack of female autonomy and independent legal

and social personhood. Their power in the new family grows over time only through the influence of

sons who might show favor to their mothers. Older women have a lot to lose if the system breaks at the

only time in their lives that they had hoped to gain from it, after much investment in their younger

years. Gupta et al. (2000) report the history of gender policies in India, Korea and China in this respect

over the 1950-2000. The communist government in China realized that is was not possible to

eliminate private property without breaking the strong kinship, age and gender structures that were

associated with the patrilineal system. They started a huge public campaign to promote gender equality

to change women’s roles, getting them out of homes to become wage earners. The campaign worked.

During the communist era women moved from homes to paid labor force and acquired new respect

and power within the family. The balance of power within the family was radically altered. An

illustrative example is the Marriage Law in 1950 which was passed to eliminate child marriages and

bride price. It led to violent resistance from men and old women – the ones who lost the power they

had in the old kinship structures. The process of privatization after 1979 has tended to make women’s

labor invisible again. As a result, China now faces gender challenges that are similar to those in

western market economies.

40
 In Korea, strong economic development was associated with strong commitment to Korean

culture. An essential part of it was maintaining women’s traditional role in the family. Movement

towards increasing women’s status came through the government’s strong commitment to family

planning to reduce fertility in 60s and 70s. It was acknowledged that the force of patrilineal social

structures had to be reduced in order to reduce the son bias at birth. Fertility could not be decreased if

women had to bear large numbers of children in order to get the desired number of sons. Later on

international efforts to improve the status of women have enabled Korean women’s organizations to

push for further reforms in the family law (see Gupta et al., 2000). In India, the caste system creates a

further obstacle to improving women’s status.

Statistical discrimination

There are common challenges that women face in market economies. One is the lower wages

women tend to earn. Statistical discrimination offers one explanation for lower wages without

implying that women have lower average productivity than men.

In European countries, women earn on average roughly 80% of what men earn (see Figure 4).

Much empirical research has been done to identify how much of this difference in earning is due to

wage discrimination. Studies using developed country data show that only a relatively small fraction of

the wage differences is due to direct discrimination, such as paying different wages for exactly the

same job to persons of similar qualifications. The finer the classification of occupations and positions,

the less discrimination there appears to be: In the same job classification, there is almost no difference

in salary between men and women. Using detailed data on Finnish industries Luukkonen (2003) finds

that discrimination amounts to 8 percent difference in the pay between men and women. These results

suggest that the most significant reason for women’s lower average incomes is segregation of the job

market. It is difficult, however, for economists to explain why female-dominated occupations are

valued less in terms of pay and prestige.

“Statistical discrimination” may help explain the pay difference not due to overt

discrimination. Statistical discrimination occurs when there is imperfect information on the

41
productivity of a person. Following Lundberg and Startz (1983), let us assume that the exogenously

given distributions of productivities of men and women are identical, but that the observed abilities

(OA) (perhaps measured by some ‘test scores’) are more reliable indicators of the true marginal

productivities (MP) for the men than for the women as follows:

OAiWOMAN MPi WOMAN

i and OAiMAN MPi i
MAN
,

WOMAN MAN
where var( ) var( ) and i indicates the individual.

In the competitive equilibrium, each individual is paid according to the expected value of his/her

marginal product conditional on the observed ability and the group membership (male or female). It

can be shown that the equilibrium wage is a weighted average of mean productivity and the

individual’s observed ability (or test score). Here the observed ability of the female workers is

weighted less because of the greater uncertainty in the observation. Therefore the wage curve facing

women is flatter than the wage curve facing men (as shown in Figure 1).

wi

Men

w Women

45o

MP OAi

Figure 1. Statistical discrimination

42
 As we can see, women with higher than average marginal productivity are paid less than men

with corresponding marginal productivity, and women with lower than average ability are paid more

than men with corresponding ability. As men and women get on average the same wage, w ,

economists might not want to call this situation discrimination.

Lundberg and Startz (1983) go a step further and recognize that the above scenario affects the

human capital investments, so that the productivities of men and women are no longer exogenous. If

women’s wage curve is flatter than men’s because their abilities are less precisely observed, this leads

to smaller returns to investment in their own human capital. Women will therefore invest less in

activities that lead to promotions. The result will be that women’s average productivities are less than

men’s, i.e. less than MP in Figure 1. An empirical study might conclude that women’s abilities are

less and therefore they are paid less on average.

Lundberg and Startz point out that this kind of discrimination can result in large allocative

efficiency losses as it becomes unprofitable for women to acquire the required skills, since the

investment they make will not be rewarded fully. In this situation, it may be beneficial to prohibit the

group-specific treatment of workers. Inefficiency costs associated with such a restriction may be

insignificant in comparison to the efficiency gains from removing the economic discrimination.

Discrimination in this case is defined as a situation where groups of people with equal average initial

productive ability do not receive equal average compensation.

Statistical discrimination is likely to be a problem in developing countries, where the statistical

odds that educated women will be productive may be very uncertain because of cultural restrictions.

The first priority of rational parents may be to make sure their sons get educated and become able to

support their families, while the daughters are expected to marry a man who is wealthier than she. This

alone makes it unprofitable for parents to educate their girls regardless of her abilities and talents.

Lagerlöf (2003) explains European growth over the past 2000 years as due to increasing equality in

education, which at some point was enough to move Europe to a higher growth equilibrium path. As

husbands (and sons) were not automatically assigned the task of economic provision in the new

equilibrium, it came to be in the parents’ interest to invest in their daughter’s productive abilities as

43
well. This illustrates how difficult it can be to gain equal opportunity in a society that as a whole

coordinates to a gender-biased equilibrium. Since this is an equilibrium that offers privileges to certain

groups, it is all too easy to point to its advantages and perceive any changes to it as threatening. At the

macro level this results in less development and slower growth as half of the population is not able to

use their abilities fully and the other half is pressed to provide economically regardless of their

abilities.

Care giving and home work

Ability to make economic choices requires earnings and the ownership of resources. For this

reasons, feminists of our time have advocated employment for women. In a modern welfare state,

however, gender hierarchy continues in the form of gendered segregation of the labor market

combined with the fact that the female sectors of the economy are generally paid less and less valued.

Women simply moved from the unpaid care of children and the elderly to the same work for pay.

Regardless of whether they are paid or not, the provision of care to children, the ill, and the aged,

whether paid and unpaid, continues to be largely women’s territory, as is education below the

university level.

The crucial nature of the often invisible work of women for any economy has been pointed out

by Joel Mokyr (2002). He goes as far as to equate increasing knowledge of the importance of

cleanliness and sanitation in the nineteenth century with the effects of the Industrial Revolution.

Previously, disease was associated with poverty. The new diffusion of knowledge about the germs and

the importance of cleanliness through all the levels of the society led to new emphasis on homework.

The heretofore “invisible” work performed by women (nutrition, childcare and hygiene) suddenly

became a top priority. As a result mortality rates were radically reduced by the end of the nineteenth

century. With this new recognition of the importance of women’s work, it is not surprising that their

labor force participation outside the home remained low during that period.

Historically, it was also considered to be women’s moral and natural duty to perform caring

labor unselfishly and without pay. This view was questioned only much later as women in the

44
developed world achieved independence by joining the labor market. Even today there are some who

argue that women should “naturally” be the ones to carry the burden of care. In response to these

voices Folbre (2001) points out that maintaining the “natural” required extensive outside restrictions

and enforcement. As cultural and legal restrictions on women diminished in the western world over

the past few decades, women are freer to pursue their own self-interest and autonomy in a way that has

been expected of men for many centuries already. In developed economies, moral arguments are no

longer sufficient to persuade women to stay in economically and culturally disadvantaged position.

However, as Folbre (2001) points out in her book titled Invisible Heart, Economics and

Family Values, there are problematic consequences of the new-found freedom from discrimination. In-

home care of children and the elderly (work that is devalued by the markets) has been reduced: women

do much less of the care work, and while men have increased their participation, their increase does

not match the reduced input from women. This in turn is bound to have long run effects on the future

development of any society if human capital is adversely affected. Lack of care and investment in

children is likely to show up later in a decrease in their human capital and capabilities. Alfred

Marshall, a professor at Cambridge, seems to have anticipated this “threat scenario.” Opposing the

admission of women to degree programs in the nineteenth century, he warned that if university

education was available to women, they would start developing their own capabilities rather than those

of their future children (Folbre, p. 12). In those days, of course, it would not even occur to him to

consider the possibility that men would share the burden of care for the children, the elderly or the

home. But at the same time, in the modern developed societies hierarchical valuations ”bite” as

women pay for children in decreased earning capacity (Fuchs, 1989). For instance, it is taken for

granted that it is the woman’s employer who pays for the costs related to maternity leaves or that it is

the mother who takes time from her job to care for a sick child.

It is increasingly clear that the rising economic responsibilities of women need to be coupled

with rising responsibilities of men in caring for children for there to be genuine economic equality.

Bojer (2000, 2005) makes this point in the context of social justice theories. Currently, literature on

gender equality focuses almost exclusively on women. Yet, genuine development must lead to

45
empowerment of both men and women, and their co-operation. Paying attention to men’s

disadvantaged position elsewhere would seem like one starting point (see Jacobsen, 2002).

In a broader sense, however, standard economics models with separate, self-interested and

autonomous agents are inadequate, as they do not consider the care work that needs to be done in the

families and society. It is unclear if it is even possible to assign an economic value on the large burden

that care work puts on any society or to design systems that would reward care work sufficientl

Traditional institutions and globalization

Globalization may be a powerful force to bring changes in the old traditional institutions and

networks that have made it difficult for women to move away from their traditional economic position.

Munshi and Rosenzweig (2006) find survey evidence that globalization may be a force to transform

traditional Indian institutions based on gender and caste. Over the past 20 years, low caste boys in

Bombay have been taught in the local language schools. Their sisters, however, are increasingly being

sent to English -speaking schools, which were traditionally attended mostly by the higher castes.

Munshi and Rosenzweig explain this differential treatment of boys and girls with the observation that

men are traditionally employed through same-caste male networks where the local language is spoken.

The network externalities for the male blue collar jobs within the jati are significant. Girls in contrast

have nothing to gain from these networks. Training in English, however, gives girls the opportunity to

be employed in the new white collar sectors of the economy. This strategy also undermining the caste

system, as it makes these girls more likely to marry outside the jati as well.

On the other hand, there is concern that globalization may lead to other kinds of economic

institutions that are oppressive to women. The export processing zones employ women in very

repetitive and very low paying jobs. Often younger girls or single mothers take these jobs temporarily,

sometimes against the wishes of her family. Critics point out that these jobs do not offer a longer term

career track for these women (See articles in The Women, Gender and Development Reader, 2002). In

spite of these drawbacks, however, the job opportunities the export processing zones offer may be a

step forward in development, allowing young women the opportunity to gain some autonomy and to

46
make their own consumptions choices. As the export processing zone companies mature, they may

also move towards more advanced production methods.

Forces facilitating growth and gender equality in developed countries

Education of girls, as well as issues relating to sexuality and fertility, more equitable

inheritance laws and practices, and increased voice of women in the society are seen as the most

critical for development today by agencies such as the World Bank and the United Nations.

Theoretical economics literature, however, is remarkably silent about the role of gender

equality in facilitating or causing growth. Lagerlöf’s 2003 article is among the exceptions. He suggests

that the reason for Europe’s spurt in economic development had to do with changes in gender equality

over the past 2000 years. These changes were possibly initiated by the spread of Christianity. In his

writings on the growth of the early Christian movement, sociologist Rodney Stark argues that in

opposition to the Greco-Roman culture that dominated the world in the first century society,

Christianity raised the status of women considerably. Some of their innovations improved the status of

widows, allowing them to remain single if they so desired and to keep their husband’s estates, and

extended women’s rights to inherit and hold property. Christianity also forbid forced child-marriages,

and as a result Christian women married as adults rather than as children (see Stark, 1999, p.95-128).

In other work, Stark (2005) makes the case that by accepting a rational view of the world and

technological development, Christianity is also the driving force behind Western economic

development.

Some of this advantage Christianity bestowed on women was lost later as it was coopted by

the Roman Empire (Torjesen 1995). The Roman Catholic Church took a progressively negative and

ambivalent stance towards women. Evil was considered to come to the world through women,

women’s sexuality was seen as impure and priests were required to leave their wives and become

celibate. Women’s roles became more restricted and focused on the home than in the initial centuries

after the birth of Christianity. The persistence of these restrictions may account for findings such as

those of Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales (2002). The Protestant Reformation loosened the hierarchy but

47
did little to free women or to eliminate restrictions in the church institutions themselves (see Tucker

and Leland, 1987). However, the rise of Protestantism may have indirectly been a crucial catalyst for

gender equality: Protestantism expected everyone, male and female, to read the Bible themselves.

This built a rationale encouraging women’s education and literacy and led to increased instruction for

girls as well as boys, a development that Lagerlöf (2003) views as responsible for moving Europe onto

a higher growth-equilibrium path.

10 Summary and conclusions

What can be said about the role of gender equality in development based on this survey?

First, the current situation in many developing countries is strikingly similar to that of Western

Europe roughly a hundred years ago. Today’s developing nations face the same issues that the now

developed countries resolved over the past century or two: education for girls, women’s political, legal

and marital rights, employment outside of the home for women and men alike, lower fertility and

reduced child mortality.

The current economics literature reveals that hierarchical (or patriarchal) gender valuations

appear in many different guises. Overall the literature hints as to the aspects of gender inequality that

seem to be associated with the overall level of economic development: values and religion, cultural

restrictions, legal and inheritance laws and practices, the marital pattern of resource allocation,

monogamy vs. polygyny, labor market access, education, fertility, gender specific market failures in

finance, and power in political decision making. The challenge in the future may be to look at the

issues from men’s perspective as well. How does gender inequality adversely affecting men? What are

the disadvantages, cultural, and economic restrictions that men face? Those restrictions will be

different from the ones women face but they may be even more severe in their own ways. These

restrictions and assumptions about men’s roles have only recently been questioned, and only in the

most technologically-advanced cultures. There can not be real gender equality unless the road leading

to it increases well-being for men as well as women.

48
 From the policy point of view, it would be important to know to what extent progress is

hindered by those societal and economic structures that could be changed by political decisions, versus

to what extent progress is hindered by more fundamental valuations and preferences of both genders.

From the reviewed literature, it seems apparent that both matter. It further appears that the relevant

values are not exogenous to the economic aspects of life. Establishing economic structures and

incentives that encourage equality are likely to affect values and customs and vice versa – both

working for economic development and growth. It is evident that the causality runs from economic

development to greater gender equality as the economic constraint become less binding: for example,

as countries become well-off enough to educate both boys and girls.

It can be argued that the immediate push for greater gender equality in the developed countries

came through the technological changes that moved the production from autarkic households to the

market place. These changes led to a change in the roles of women, men and children. As

technological development made products available at lower cost than they could be produced at

home, first men, then children, and finally women were no longer needed for production purposes

within the household. The organization of household economies, where women specialized in the

home production along with child bearing and rearing, became obsolete as more and more of the

needed goods were produced outside the home. The economic pressure to have many children

disappeared. Instead of children serving as inputs to production they started to serve consumption

purposes. Further technological advances have eliminated the need for the full-time presence of

women in the household as well. As a result, women in the developed world have to a large extent

joined men in seeking paid employment outside of the home.

The required adjustment to these changes has not been quick or easy. It required a profound

change in the old patriarchal world where the roles of men and women were distinctly different -

women’s identity and roles centered on the child bearing. And one of the consequences of the loss of

the economic value of the family has been a deterioration of the family itself – high divorce rates, large

numbers of children growing up with only one parent, decreases in marriage rates, and soon-to-be

disastrously low birthrates in most wealthy countries (see Miles, 2006, for the development of these

49
arguments). While these challenges still lie ahead for many developing countries, the developed world

has yet to complete the process of achieving full equality between the sexes while supporting the

development of the human capital of future generations.

50
Figure 2. Adult illiteracy rate

30
25
female % - 20
15
male % 10
5
0
1970 1998 2002

World Low Income Middle Income High Income

Source: World Development Indicators,

2000 and 2005, World Bank

Figure 3. Labor force participation rate

0,8
0,6
female/male 0,4
0,2
0
1970 1998 2003
World Low Income Middle Income High Income

Source: World Development

Indicators, 2000 and 2005
World Bank

51
Figure 4. Women's pay in % of men's pay, full time

100 France
80 Denmark
60 UK
40 Finland
20 Germany
0 Romania
1995 1997 2000
Norway
Source:UN/ECE women and men in Europe and
North America, 2000 Poland

Figure 5. Gender segregation

100
80
women in %
of total 60
employment, 40
2000
20
0
EU Ita Fin Fra Ger Swe UK
Services Industry

Source: Employment in Europe

52
Figure 6. Percentage of women in Government, 1996

40
35
30
25
20
15 Ministerial
10
Subministerial
5
0
All Ita Fin Fra Ger Swe UK US
Source: www.un.org/womenwatch/daw

Figure 7. Percentage of women in Government, 1996

25

20

15

10 Ministerial

Subministerial
5

0
Rus China India Arg Col Egypt Nig Jap
source: www.un.org/womenwatch/daw

53
Figure 8. Total fertility rate, births per woman

6
World
5
4
Low Income
3
2 excl. China/India
1
0 Middle Income
1980 1998 2003
Source: World Development Indicators, 2000 and
High Income
2005 World Bank

54
References
Agarwal, Bina (2001), The Hidden Side of Group Behaviour: A Gender Analysis Of Community
Forestry Groups, QEH Working Paper Series, No.76.

____________ (1994), A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia, Cambridge
University.

Akerlof, George and Kranton, Rachel (2000), Economics and Identity, The Quarterly Journal of
Economics, p. 715-753.

Andersson, Gunnar; Hank, Karsten; Ronsen, Marit and Vikat, Andres (2004), Gendering the
Family Composition: Sex Preferences for Children and Childbearing Behavior in the Nordic
Countries, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Working Paper 2004-016.

Anker, Richard (1997), Theories of occupational segregation by sex: An overview, International Labour
Review, Vol. 136, No. 3. (www.ilo.org/public/english/support/publ/revue/articles/ank97-3.htm)

Armendariz de Aghion, Beatriz and Morduch Johathan (2005), The Economics of Microfinance,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.

Barro, Robert J. (1996), Democracy and growth, Journal of Economic Growth, Vol. 1, p. 1-27.

_______(1997), Determinants of Economic Growth, A Cross-Country Empirical Study, The MIT

Press.
_______(1999a), Inequality, growth, and investment, NBER Working Paper No. 7038.

_______(1999b), Determinants of Democracy, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 107, No.6.

Barro, Robert J. and Lee, Jong-Wha (2001), International Data on Educational Attainment
Updates and Implications, Oxford Economic Papers, Vol. 3, p. 541-563.

_______ (1994), Sources of economic growth. Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public

Policy 40, p. 1-46.

Barro, Robert J. and Sala-i-Martin, Xavier (1995), Economic Growth, New York, McGraw-Hill.

Ben-Ner, Avner; Kong, Fanmin and Putterman, Louis (2004), Share and share alike? Gender-
pairing, personality, and cognitive ability as determinants of giving, Journal of Economic
Psychology 25, p. 581-589.

Blank, Rebecca and Reimers, Cordelia W. (2003), Economics, Policy, and Feminism, in Feminist
Economics Today, Beyond Economic Man, eds. Ferber and Nelson, University of Chicago Press.

Becker, Gary (1991), A Treatise on the Family, Harvard University Press.

Bojer, Hilde (2005), The Social Contract, Unpaid Child Care and Women’s Economic Capability,
manuscript, University of Oslo, (http://folk.uio.no/hbojer/nussbaum.pdf)

___________(2000), Children and Theories of Social Justice, Feminist Economics, Vol. 6, No. 2, p.
23-39.

55
Botticini, Maristella and Siow, Aloysius (2003), Why Dowries? American Economic Review 93,
No. 4, 1385-98.

Braunstein, Elissa and Folbre, Nancy (2001), To Honor and Obey: Efficiency, Inequality, and
Patriarchal Property Rights, Feminist Economics, Vol. 7, No.1, p. 25-44.

Browning, Martin and Chiappori, Pierre-Andre (1998), Efficient intra-household allocations: A

general characterization and empirical tests, Econometrica, Vol. 66, No.6, 1241-1278.

Burda, Michael; Hamermesh, Daniel and Weil, Philippe (2007), Total work, Gender and Social
Norms, NBER Working Paper No 13000.

Chattopadhyay, Raghabendra and Duflo, Esther (2004), Women as Policy Makers: Evidence
from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India, Econometrica, Vol. 72, No 5, 1409-1443.

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz (1983). More Work for Mothers: The Ironies of Household
Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books.

Crocker, Jennifer (1999), Social Stigma and Self-Esteem: Situational Construction of Self-Worth,
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 35, p. 89-107.

Dahl, Gordon and Moretti, Enrico (2004), The demand for sons: evidence from divorce, fertility,
and shotgun marriage, NBER Working Paper No. 10281.

Dollar, David and Gatti, Roberta (1999), Gender Inequality, Income, and Growth: Are Good
Times Good for Women? Policy Research Report on Gender and Development, Working Paper
Series, No. 1, The World Bank.

Dollar, David; Fisman, Raymond and Gatti, Roberta (2001), Are Women Really the "Fairer"
Sex? Corruption and Women in Government, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol.
46, 423-429.

Duflo, Esther and Topalova, Petia (2004), Unappreciated Service: Performance, Perceptions, and
Women Leaders in India, manuscript (http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/download_pdf.php?id=1070)

Duflo, Esther and Udry, Christopher (2003), Intra-household resource allocation in Côte D’Ivoire:
social norms, separate accounts and consumption choices, Economic Growth Center Discussion
Paper No. 857, Yale University.

Duflo, Esther (2005), Gender Equality in Development, manuscript ( http://econ-

www.mit.edu/faculty/download_pdf.php?id=1263)

Easterly, William (2001), The Elusive Quest for Growth, The MIT Press.

Edlund, Lena and Pande, Rohini (2002), Why Have Women Become Left-Wing? The Political
Gender Gap and the Decline in Marriage, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, p. 917-961.

Edlund, Lena; Haider, Laila and Pande, Rohini (2003), The Feminization of the Left: Causes and
Consequences – Evidence from Europe, preliminary manuscript.

England, Paula and Folbre, Nancy (2003), Contracting for care, in Feminist Economics Today,
Beyond Economic Man, eds. Ferber and Nelson, University of Chicago Press.

Esteve-Volart, Berta (2000), Sex Discrimination and Growth, IMF Working Paper, 00/84.

56
Eurostat (2001), Statistics in Focus. Population and Social Consitions, Theme 3_ 18/2001. Source:
http://epp.eurostat.cec.eu.int/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-NK-01-018/EN/KS-NK-01-018-EN.PDF
Ferber, Marianne A. and Nelson, Julie A. (2003), Feminist Economics Today: Beyond Economic
Man. Press.

Folbre, Nancy (2001), The Invisible Heart, Economics and Family Values, The New Press.

Franks, Mary Anne (2003), Obscene Undersides: Women and Evil between the Taliban and the
United States, Hypatia, Vol. 18, No.1.

Fuchs, Victor (1989), Women’s Quest for Economic Equality, Journal of Economic Perspectives,
Vol.3, No.1, p.25-41.

Galor, Oded and Weil, David (1999), From Malthusian Stagnation to modern Growth, American
Economic Review, Vol. 89, No.2, p. 150-154.

___________________ (1996), The Gender Gap, Fertility, and Growth, The American Economic
Review, Vol.86, No.3.

Goldin, Claudia (2006), The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women’s Employment,
Education, and Family, American Economic Review, Vol. 96, No 2, p. 1-21.

Greenwood, Jeremy; Seshadri, Ananth and Vandenbroucke, Guillaume (2005 a), The Baby
Boom and Baby Bust, American Economic Review, Vol. 95, No 1, p. 183-207.

Greenwood, Jeremy; Seshadri, Ananth and Yorukoglu, Mehmet (2005 b), Engines of
Liberation, Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 72, p. 109-133.

Guiso, Luigi; Sapienza, Paola and Zingales, Luigi (2002), People's Opium? Religion and
Economic Attitudes, Center for Economic Policy Research, Discussion Paper No. 3588.

Hall, Robert E. and Jones, Charles I. (1999), Why Do some Countries Produce so Much More
Output Per Worker Than Others? The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 114, No 1,
p. 83-115.

Humana, Charles (1999), World Human Rights Guide. 3rd ed., New York: Oxford University Press.

Jacobsen, Joyce (2002), What about us? Men’s issues in development. Manuscript.

Kanbur, Ravi (2002), Education, Empowerment and Gender Inequalities, Cornell University.
www.people.cornell.edu/pages/sk145.

Kandiyoti, Deniz (2002), Bargaining with Patriarchy, The Women, Gender and Development
Reader, Eds. Visvanathan, Duggan, Nisonoff and Wiegersma, Zed Books.

Katz, Elizabeth (1997), The Intra-Household Economics of Voice and Exit, Feminist Economics,
Vol.3, No.3, p. 25-46.

Klasen, Stephen (1999), Does Gender Inequality Reduce Growth and Development? Evidence from
Gross-Country Regressions, Policy Research Report on Gender and Development, Working Paper
Series, No. 7, The World Bank.

57
Knack, Stephen and Keefer, Philip (1997), Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff? A
Cross-Country Investigation, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 112, No 4, p. 1251-1288.

Korhonen, Perttu (2004), Tohtorin tekijät, Jatkokoulutuksen tarjontatekijöiden merkitys jatko-

opintojen kestossa – elinaika-analyysi. MA thesis, Department of Economics, University of
Helsinki.

Lagerlöf, Nils-Petter (2003) Gender Equality and Long-Run Growth, Journal of Economic Growth,
Vol. 8, p. 403-426.

Lorgelly, Paula (2000), Are there Gender-Separate Human Capital Effects on Growth? A Review of
the Recent Empirical Literature, University of Nottingham, CREDIT Research Paper No. 00/13.

Lorgelly, Paula and Owen, Dorian (1999) The effect of female and male schooling on economic
growth in Barro-Lee model, Empirical Economics, Vol. 24, p. 537-557.

Lott, John R, Jr. and Kenny, Lawrence W. (1999), Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and
Scope of Government? Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 07, No 6.

Luke, Nancy and Munshi, Kaivan (2003), What Role Does Marriage Play in Urban Africa?
Evidence from a High HIV Area in Kenya, MIT Department of Economics Working Paper 03-20.

Luke, Nancy and Munshi, Kaivan (2005), Women as Agents of Change: Female Income, Social
Affiliation and Household Decisions in South India, manuscript.

Lundberg, Shelly and Pollak, Robert (2003), Efficiency in Marriage, Review of Economics of the
Household, Sept., p. 153-167.

____________ (1996), Bargaining and Distribution in Marriage, Journal of Economic Perspectives,

Vol. 10, No. 4, p.139-158.

____________ (1993), Separate Spheres Bargaining and the Marriage Market, Journal of Political
Economy, Vol. 101, p. 988-1010.

Lundberg, Shelly and Startz, Richard (1983), Private Discrimination and Social Intervention in
Competitive Labor Markets, American Economic Review, Vol. 73, No 3, p. 340-347.

Luukkonen, Antti (2003), Palkkadiskriminaatio Suomen teollisuussektorin toimihenkilöillä vuonna

2000, Government Institute for Economic Research, Discussion Paper No 309.

Melkas, Helinä and Anker, Richard (1997), Occupational Segregation by Sex in Nordic
Countries. An Empirical Investigation, International Labour Review, p. 341-363.

Miles, Carrie A. (2005), Patriarchy or Gender Equality? Reading the New Testament in Light
of Becker’s Treatise on the Family and the Concept of Spiritual Capital,” paper presented at
the annuals meetings of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture,
November 5, 2005.

_____________(2007), “’Because Women Are Property’: Issues of Gender, Property

Ownership and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa,” paper to be presented at the 2007
meeting of UNU-Wider in Accra, Ghana, May, 2007.

58
_____________ (2006), The Redemption of Love: Rescuing Marriage and Sexuality from the
Economics of a Fallen World, Brazos Press.

Mokyr, Joel (2002), The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, Princeton
University Press.

Morduch, Jonathan (1999), The Microfinance Promise, Journal of Economic Literature, Vol.
XXXVII.

Munshi, Kaivan and Rosenzweig, Mark (2006), Traditional Institutions Meet the Modern World:
Caste, Gender and Schooling in a Globalizing Economy, American Economic Review, Vol. 96, No
4, p. 1225-1252.

Nelson, Julie and England, Paula (2002), Feminist Philosophies of Love and Work, Hypatia, Vol.
17, No 2, p. 1-18.

Noponen, Helzi (2003), The Internal Learning system – Assessing Impact While Addressing
Participant Learning Needs, Paper presented at the Devestu seminar on Political Economy of Aid
and Poverty, May, 2004, in Kellokoski, Finland, available at
http://www.enterprise-impact.org.uk/pdf/Noponen.pdf

Pollak, Robert (1994), For Better or Worse: The Roles of Power in Models of Distribution within
Marriage, American Economic Review, Vol. 84, No.2, p. 148-152.

La Porta, Rafael; Lopez-de-Silanes, Florencio; Shleifer, Andrei and Vishny, Robert (1997),
Trust in Large Organizations, American Economic Review, Vol. 87, No 2, p. 333-338.

Roy, K.C. and Tisdell, C.A. (2002), Property Rights in Women's Empowerment in Rural India: A
Review, International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 29, No. = 4, p. 315-334.

Sen, Amartya (1999), Development as Freedom, Anchor Books.

____________ (1997a), Population Policy: Authoritarianism versus Cooperation, Journal of
Population Economics, Vol. 10, p. 3-22.

_____________ (1997b), Inequality, Unemployment and Contemporary Europe, International

Labour Review, Vol. 136, No 2, p.155-171.

Siddique, M.A.B. (1998), Gender Issues in Poverty Alleviation: A Case Study of Bangladesh,
International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 25, No 6/7/8, p.1095-1111.

Smith, Ian (2003),The law and economics of marriage contracts, Journal of Economic Surveys,
Vol.17, No 2, p. 201-225.

Spencer, Steven J.; Steele, Claude M. and Quinn, Diane M. (1999), Stereotype Threat and
Women’s Math performance, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 35, p. 4-28.

Stark, Rodney (1999), The Rise of Christianity, Princeton University Press.

_____________ (2005), The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and
Western Success, Random House.

Svensson, Lars (2006), Mother’s Time. Technology, Institutions and the Allocation of Time
between Household Activities and Market Work in Sweden during Short Twentieth Century. Paper

59
presented at the International Economic History Conference, Aug. 2006.
http://www.helsinki.fi/iehc2006/papers1/Svensson.pdf.

Thomas, Sue (1991), The impact of women on state legislative policies, Journal of Politics, Vol.53,
No.4, p. 658-976.

Tisdell, Clem (2002), Gender Inequality in India: Evidence From a Survey in Rural West Bengal,
International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 29, No 9, p. 706-721.

Torgler, Benno and Valev Neven T. (2006), Women and Illegal Activities: Gender Differences
and Women’s Willingness to Comply over Time, Center for Research in Economics, Management
and the Arts Working Paper No 2006 – 15.

Torjesen, Karen J. (1995), When Women Were Priests: Women’s Leadership in the Early Church
and the Scandal of Their Subordination. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, reprint edition.

Tucker, Ruth and Liefeld, Walter (1987), Daughters of the Church, Zondervan Publishing House.

Udry, Christopher (1996), Gender, Agricultural Production, and the Theory of the Household,
Journal of Political Economy, Vol.104, No 5, p. 1010-1046.

UNDP (2003a), Human Development Report 2003, Oxford University Press.

______(2003b), Millennium Development Goals, Source: http://www.undp.org/gender/docs/mdgs-

genderlens.pdf

UNIFEM Biennial Report (2000), Progress of the World's Women 2000.

US Census, Source: http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school.html

Women, Gender and Development Reader (2002), Eds. Visvanathan, Duggan, Nisonoff and
Wiegersma, Zed Books.

World Bank (2004), World Development Indicators 2004.

Weil, David (2005), Economic Growth, Addison-Wesley Publishing.

Zhang, Junsen and Chan, William (1999), Dowry and Wife's Welfare: A Theoretical and
Empirical Analysis, Journal of Political Economy, Vol.107, No 4, p.786-808.

60