There are large cultural differences in the beliefs people have regarding the proper role of women in society. A flurry of recent research ascribes at least some portion of this variation to historical material forces that have shaped the opportunities for women to participate in the labor force. We have blogged earlier about the argument that oil crowds out low-wage manufacturing, thereby reducing the opportunities for women to work outside the home and thus affecting gender roles. Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn have a new paper that makes a similar argument about early agricultural technologies, in particular the role of the plough. These types of arguments challenge views that cultural differences about gender roles originate in religion or other value systems. The abstract is below.
This paper studies the historic origins of current differences in norms and beliefs about the role of women in society. We show that, consistent with anthropological hypotheses, societies with a tradition of plough agriculture tend to have the belief that the natural place for women is inside the home and the natural place for men is outside the home. Looking across countries, subnational districts, ethnic groups and individuals, we identify a link between historic plough-use and a number of outcomes today, including female labor force participation, female participation in politics, female ownership of firms, the sex ratio and self-expressed attitudes about the role of women in society. Our identification exploits variation in the historic suitability of the environment of ancestors for growing crops that differentially benefitted from the adoption of the plough. We examine culture as a mechanism by looking at first and second generation immigrants with different cultural backgrounds living within the US.
h/t Kevin Lewis
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I look forward to seeing how (if at all) they controlled for the way that cultures may have influenced each other in the past, or had common ancestors, and so will not be independent conditional on current covariates.
And the answer, based on a quick scan of the paper, is: they don’t.
Shalizi,
So shoupd they adopt methods from phylogenetics, such as independent contrasts? Is it even realistic for them to infer the historical relationships among cultures?
Regarding the independence of measurements: scanning the tables, it looks like they included several controls that would account for some of the historical non-independence of measurements.
First, they have a “region” control. Then they also have controls for political and economic systems (e.g. Communism)
Looking at one of their maps, Saudi Arabia is probably one of the biggest counter-examples. I also found their use of “northern Europe” odd. It usually refers to more than just the Scandinavian peninsula.
Unless you’re talking about actual laws passed down by a deity, the idea that cultural differences might originate in religion or other value systems seems basically confused. Maybe I’ve just drunk the materialistic kool-aid, but it seems plenty obvious that 1. values precede value systems, not the other way around, and therefore 2. values need to have a separate origin, and 3. values are mostly determined by material and economic forces. Is there a competing theory that I’ve missed completely?
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