Persistent norms and tipping points: The case of female genital cutting

More than 200 million women alive today have undergone female genital cutting (FGC). Despite the associated negative health outcomes, the practice has persisted for generations. The prevailing theory of FGC persistence is that FGC is a social coordination norm, which implies that if a sufficient number of community members agree to abandon FGC, a tipping point is reached and the rate of FGC will fall to zero. Recent empirical evidence is inconsistent with this theory. This paper formalizes an alternative theoretical explanation in which households have heterogeneous thresholds—i.e. the rate of FGC in their community at which the household switches from practicing to not practicing FGC. This threshold heterogeneity removes the certainty that a tipping point exists and introduces the possibility of a stable internal equilibrium in the rate of FGC in a community. Using a dataset of more than 27,000 women born across 4.5 decades in Burkina Faso, I use a novel technique to construct community-level distributions of household thresholds. These distributions show that some communities in Burkina Faso have tipping points while some have a stable internal equilibrium. I find suggestive, but statistically insignificant, evidence that communities with a larger share of educated women, higher poverty rates, and lower population density are more likely to have a tipping point. Additionally, the empirical method developed in this paper has applications to the evolution of other social phenomena such as technology adoption, voting behavior, and racial segregation.