Patriarchy, Development, and the Divergence of Gender Equality

What will happen to gender equality as the world develops? While modernization theory stresses the emergence of increasingly cosmopolitan gender values, work on the cultural roots of gender roles finds that measures of historical patriarchy exert a persistent influence on contemporary attitudes toward and outcomes for women. Motivated by this disparity, I develop a simple model illustrating the interplay between economic development, sexist social norms, and women’s labor supply. The model predicts that women’s labor supply will follow a U-shaped relationship, and that female labor supply will be lower, fall over a greater income range, and then rise more slowly for countries with a more patriarchal history. I investigate and confirm these predictions in a broad sample of countries employing six different measures of patriarchal history reflecting agricultural history, religious traditions, rainfall patterns, and linguistic structures as well as a composite measure of patriarchal history. These findings suggest that gender inequality will diverge as countries develop, reflecting the ability of richer countries to more fully realize their sexist values