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Gender Laws, Values, and Outcomes: Evidence from the World Values Survey - Working Paper 452

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  • Charles Kenny, Dev Patel

Abstract

This paper analyzes six waves of responses from the World Values Survey to understand the determinants of beliefs about women’s roles in society and their relationship with the legal system and outcomes. Using survey data for 300,000 individuals, we find that characteristics of an individual’s home country only explain about a fifth of the variation in values, and a single individual can report strongly different norms about women’s equality across different domains. There is a strong correlation between norms, laws and female labor force participation and between norms and the proportion of legislators who are women—but not between norms and relative female tertiary education. There is some suggestive evidence that laws may be more significant than norms in determining female employment outcomes, but the available evidence does not allow for strong causal statements at the cross-country level.

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  • Charles Kenny, Dev Patel, 2017. "Gender Laws, Values, and Outcomes: Evidence from the World Values Survey - Working Paper 452," Working Papers 452, Center for Global Development.
    • Handle: RePEc:cgd:wpaper:452
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Values; Economics of Gender; Human Development; Gender Law;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A13 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Social Values
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • K38 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - Human Rights Law; Gender Law; Animal Rights Law
    • O15 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration

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