Legal Regimes and Womens Economic Agency

Studies from across the world have shown that improving women's opportunities - by enabling them to get an education, inherit land, work outside of the home, or hold positions of power - is an effective way of challenging gender discrimination, changing social norms, and contributing to development. Yet, in many countries, the opportunities of women are constrained by laws and regulations that make it hard for them to be economically independent and play an active role in public life. Other places, the main challenge is that laws aimed at creating a more gender-equal society are implemented unevenly or have unintended effects. This project is a comparative study of how laws and regulations affect women's role in society. The first part of the project looks at cross-country associations between gender-discriminatory laws and indicators of women's empowerment. We find, among other things, that women's legal capacity, such as married women's right to sign a contract, is strongly associated with women's asset ownership and labor force participation. Further, laws allowing for discrimination in wage work is associated with larger wage gaps between women and men, and governmental parental leave is associated with smaller wage gaps, but only in countries with a large formal sector. These findings highlight the importance of conceptualizing and measuring legal rights for women (and their effects) as multidimensional. In the second part of the project we look at specific instances of legal change in different contexts, including in Spain, Mexico, USA, Japan, and India, to understand more about the effects (and limitations) of countries' legal regimes on women’s empowerment. Here we find, among other things, that rules meant to get Spain out of the financial crisis have pushed more women into precarious working conditions; that the weak implementation of the age limit to marry in India have serious effects on girls educational attainment and consequently their economic independence and political engagement; and that efforts to get more men into care-taking roles in Japan are limited by people’s adherence to traditional social norms. We also find, however, that the state plays an important role in improving opportunities for women and also in shaping social norms: efforts to reduce sexual harassment in educational institutions in the US have changed students’ perspectives on what behaviors should be considered harassment at all, local politicians in Spain are able to undermine the negative consequences of national legislation, legal changes in Mexico seem to have resulted in rapid changes in attitudes towards violence against women in Mexico, women’s entry into positions of power in India have given many the opportunity to gain experience and become powerful, and role models and symbolic efforts in Japan are resulting in gradual changes in the view of fatherhood. Our results indicate that the state affects society directly by its rules and sanctions, but also by releasing funds and resources, and by sending signals about appropriate behavior that are shaping attitudes and norms both in the short and the long run.

The most direct effects of this project have been the following: - The consolidation of the academic profile of the PI. Going into this project, the PI was only a few years out of her PhD, and her area of expertise was primarily Indian politics. This project was comparative and focused on gender and politics. Having now published on gender and politics with a cross-country focus, as well as on data from Mexico and the USA, she has gained a foothold in several new fields. - The recruitment and support of a talented female PhD candidate, who has written a fascinating thesis about the gendered effects of the austerity measures implemented after the financial crisis in Spain. - The production of high-quality research, including several new public datasets (available at www.francesca.no), as well as insights from data from in-depth fieldwork. In terms of impact, we believe that both our datasets and our publications contribute substantially to the debates about the empowerment of women and the effects of empowering women, by unpacking the mechanisms that link legal changes to social changes and clarifying how laws affect different subgroups of women in different ways. Our work has received considerable attention by academic communities across the world. For example, we have given lectures about our findings in Pakistan, Mexico, Japan, and at multiple universities in the United States and Norway. Several of our publications have found their way onto syllabi across the world. We have also shared our research findings with stakeholders such as advocacy groups for global gender equality, activists working to expand the rights of Muslim women, officials at the United Nations and the World Bank, the Japanese government, and other non-governmental organizations.

A growing number of studies show that women's economic agency, understood as the ability to make independent economic choices due to access to resources via asset ownership, control of land, or employment, is key to contesting unequal gender relations, refashioning social norms, and creating sustainable development. Yet in much of the developing world the economic agency of women is still constrained by legal provisions that deny them the ability to work, to own land, to inherit, to sign contracts, and to act as autonomous agents in the public sphere. Such provisions restrict the important social mechanism of economic agency that can enable women to contest oppressive gender relations from the ground up. This project is a comparative study of how family laws, labor codes, and public policies differentially shape women's economic agency across the world. While laws usually apply to whole countries or regions, we start this project with two important premises: (1) that laws will be unevenly implemented due to intra-country variation in state capacity and the rule of law, and (2) that women are not a single category, but rather internally divided along the lines of class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on. Based on these premises, we expect the impact of legal provisions to vary with the capacity of states and the characteristics of individual women. Combining in-depth qualitative work with cutting-edge quantitative techniques, this project seeks to improve our understanding of how legal changes affect the economic agency of different sub-groups of women across the world, clarify the mechanisms that link legal provisions to different forms of economic agency, and empirically test these mechanisms.