Ceding Power in Intra-Household Bargaining in Times of Economic Anxiety: An Experimental Study in Nepal

How do perceptions of one's relative economic status affect beliefs regarding gender roles? We conducted a 2019 survey experiment with approximately 2,000 adults in Nepal. Employing an established survey treatment called a priming experiment to subtly alter half of respondents' perceptions of their relative economic well-being, we ?find that increased feelings of relative deprivation make married women significantly less likely to support gender egalitarian perspectives. Women decrease their support for women making decisions over household expenditures, having equal control over household income, sharing household chores, and women working outside the home. A message randomly read to some women and designed to spur increased support for women's empowerment does little to alter beliefs regarding gender roles or to attenuate the effects of the relative deprivation prime. Despite the negative impacts on women's gender attitudes, however, we do not find a similar pattern among married men. The results underscore the deleterious effects that feelings of relative deprivation can have on women's own gender attitudes and provide a cautionary tale given trends toward greater economic inequality further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Does the Stereotypicality of Mothers’ Occupation Influence Children’s Communal Occupational Aspirations and Communal Orientation?

Career development is a lifelong process that starts in infancy and is shaped by a number of different factors during childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Even though career development is shaped through life, relatively little is known about the predictors of occupational aspirations in childhood. Therefore, in the present work we investigate how the stereotypicality of a mother’s occupation (female-dominated/communal vs. non-female-dominated/agentic) influences her young child’s communal occupational aspirations and communal orientation. We conducted two studies with young children. Study 1 included 72 mother–child dyads recruited from childcare centers in Northern Norway (children’s age range: 4½–6 years). Study 2 included 106 mother–child dyads recruited from Norwegian elementary schools (children’s age range: 6 to 13 years). Results from Study 1 showed that the stereotypicality of mothers’ occupation was related to their children’s communal occupational aspirations and children’s communal orientation. In contrast to our predictions and results from Study 1, the stereotypicality of mothers’ occupation was not significantly related to children’s communal occupational aspirations nor their communal orientation in Study 2. In both studies, we found no relationship between mothers’ gender attitudes or share of child care and children’s communal occupational aspirations. The results are discussed in terms of parents’ influence on children’s development of occupational aspirations.

Childhood in the memoirs of Russian female historians of the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries

The present paper studies ego-documents of Russian female historians written in the second half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries, with a focus on the works of N.I. Gagen-Thorn, E.V. Gutnova, M.M. Levis, V.N. Kharuzina, S.V. Zhitomirskaya, E.N. Shchepkina, and N.D. Flittner. How do these authors, in their childhood descriptions, discuss their professional choices? By producing ego-documents, the female historians wanted to preserve their memory of childhood events in the form of a new historical source. In so doing they followed the principles that they also adhered to when wri- ting historical essays. At the same time their texts are very subjective: each reflects the respective researcher's personal experiences. Each text is unique, and there are few overlaps with the memoirs of other female historians of their time, or with those of younger colleagues. In many ways, the women were influenced by authors of the Russian memoirist tradition; they often adhered to self-censorship (even when there was no clear ideological pressure from society). As a result, the narrative about childhood turned into a narrative about the prerequisites for the self-identification of women as scientists. Memories became a form of self-representation, and this conditioned the selective nature of childhood narratives; later success in the profession was projected back onto childhood memories. The childhood narratives of Russian female historians differ from texts of their male colleagues: women preferred to describe their impressions with references to material artifacts and to everyday rituals, writing carefully about their emotional experiences. One of the most important subjects in these womens memoirs and diaries was when they for the first time experienced the gender conflict in their lives: when they understood that their scholarly ambition runs against the common attitudes about gender attitudes that they had internalized in early childhood.

Gender and Social Mobility

Women have historically been overlooked in research on social mobility. In contrast, new research focuses on the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes and norms as determinants of women’s labour force participation in industrialized countries. This chapter discusses the measurement of gender attitudes and reviews research findings. Studies reveal that gender attitudes are a key transmission mechanism for intergenerational economic mobility beyond wealth and other economic factors. Mothers’ egalitarian views and less-restrictive gender norms promote greater labour force participation for daughters and daughters-in-law. There are few investigations in the Global South, where restrictive gender attitudes and norms are more pervasive and could potentially have greater impact in shaping women’s labour force participation. The chapter concludes with a brief case study of women’s labour force participation in India, where the direct link between gender attitudes and women’s labour market engagement could provide a further explanation for its recent decline.

Mobile Phones and Attitudes Towards Women’s Participation in Politics: Evidence from Africa

This study explores the relationship between technology adoption and attitudes towards gender equality in political representation by relying on diffusion theories coupled with frameworks of ideational change, social interaction, and world society. We examine whether the use of mobile phones shapes gender attitudes towards women’s participation in politics by making it more widely accepted that women hold institutional roles. We do so by using micro-level data from the AfroBarometer, covering 36 African countries and adopting a multilevel modeling approach. Our results suggest that regular use of mobile phones is associated with more positive attitudes towards women’s participation in politics. The significant relationship – robust to the use of instrumental variable (IV) techniques – is observed only among women. This finding strengthens the idea that technology adoption on the part of women, by improving connectivity and expanding access to information, may be a successful lever to raise women’s status and promote societal well-being, ultimately contributing to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 that seeks to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.” Concurrently, the lack of a significant relationship for men highlights an important yet often neglected issue: policies aimed at changing gender attitudes are often targeted towards women, but men’s attitudes can be stickier than women’s, thus requiring further attention.