Do remittances reduce women’s acceptance of domestic violence? Evidence from Pakistan

There is an emerging interdisciplinary literature that explores the transformation of prevailing gender norms as communities experience emigration and associated inflows of remittances. This paper focuses on a key gender norm, namely, women’s perception of experiencing domestic violence. Specifically, we investigate the impact of household access to remittance income on attitudes held by women in the household regarding the acceptability of domestic violence. Using data from a Multiple Indicators Cluster Survey conducted in the Punjab province of Pakistan in 2014, we isolate the causal impact of remittance income by employing a matching estimator to construct counterfactuals that allow us to compare women from otherwise identical households who differ solely in their access to remittances. Our results indicate that women in households with access to remittances are less likely to accept domestic violence than women in comparable households without remittance income, though there is considerable heterogeneity once we differentiate between different contexts for DV. Interestingly, the result persists even when we distinguish between transnational and domestic remittances, access to either type of transfer reducing the acceptance of domestic violence by comparable magnitudes. This suggests the operation of mechanisms other than the transnational diffusion of gender norms that has typically been emphasized in the literature.