The role of economic factors in the evolution of women’s rights

Summary of the research article: Tertilt, M., Doepke, M., Hannusch, A., & Montenbruck, L. (2022). Marshall Lecture 2022: The Economics of Women’s Rights. Journal of the European Economic Association, 20(6), 2271-2316.

Topics: Women’s rights, Economic development

Summary by Leïla Costil, Research assistant

Is there a direct link between economic development and expansions of women’s rights? To what extent can economic analyses contribute to our understanding of these issues? The authors of this study demonstrate the key role of economic channels, alongside culture and enlightenment, in the evolution of women’s rights. Read the original article.

Summary

This research in economics studies four main economic channels of changes in women’s rights. 

1. The bargaining power channel refers to the power play between women and men in the sharing of resources, and studies the rights that each member within a couple has on the sharing of resources within the family. 
2. The parental altruism channel modelizes parents’ care for children, where fathers care for women’s rights because of their daughters, and could hence benefit indirectly from an increase in investments in children. 
3. The income channel theorizes that women’s rights can in some circumstances increase total household resources which can in turn benefit men, hence that more women’s rights could be in some cases beneficial to men. 
4. Finally, political economy models focus on the public policy channel as a way to transform women’s rights, through the inclusion of women in policymaking. 

This paper uses empirical cross-country data to illustrate the significant impact of economic forces on the historical expansion of women’s rights. It suggests that such forces may be equally useful in explaining cross-country differences in women’s rights. Overall, research finds that women’s rights are strongly associated with economic development and that the income and parental altruism channels significantly help to explain the historical, cross-country differences in women’s rights. The income channel seems most important for the evolution of economic and labour rights. Parental altruism also seems to play a role, especially on economic, body and labour rights. Finally, the researchers highlight the importance of other, non-economic factors, such as culture, religion and general enlightenment (i.e., the idea that the expansion of women’s rights is part of a general trend characterised by growing recognition of previously excluded groups). Religion interacts with economic development and can diminish the effect of economic channels that increase women’s rights. General enlightenment on the other hand, may have played a role in the expansion of body rights in recent decades. 

Data

This paper primarily relies on the World Bank’s Women, Business, and the Law database to create a rights index for each of the four specific areas of rights: economic rights, labour rights, political rights and women’s rights over their own body. The researchers use information from other sources, namely Skaaning, Gerring and Bartusevicius (2015), and Paxton, Green and Hughes (2008) to improve the index of political rights, as well as Boyle, Kim and Longhofer (2015) for the body rights index. They also use the World Population Policies Database in 2011, 2013 and 2015 as well as the UN Population Division in 2017 for more recent data. 

Methodology

The researchers conduct econometric analyses to explain the legal rights data they constructed with variables such as GDP per capita (an indicator of economic development), total fertility rate and female labour force participation. The total fertility rate is used so as to estimate the parental altruism channel, whilst the female labour force participation gives a good indication of the impact of the income channel. The researchers do not include a separate variable for the public policy channel, arguing that its changes are driven by the same factors that impact the income and parental altruism channels. Hence, the economic variables estimated before can be interpreted as also capturing the public policy channel. Similarly, the researchers do not include the bargaining channel, based on the assumption that this basic distributional conflict is still present and has been less drastically transformed over time. They consider two additional drivers of women’s rights: culture (through religion and country fixed effects) and general enlightenment (accounted for through time fixed effects). Finally, they consider factors specific to individual laws so as to check multiple theories developed in previous papers. 

Findings

The researchers find that the economic variables - economic development, women’s labour force participation and the total fertility rate - explain large shares of cross-country variation for women’s economic, labour, political and body rights. Increases in economic development and women’s labour force participation, as well as decreases in the total fertility rate, have sizable positive effects on women’s rights.