Ceding Power in Intra-Household Bargaining in Times of Economic Anxiety

• In Event: Gender Norms, Gender Rights, and Power

Abstract

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.

Authors

• Katrina Kosec, IFPRI

• Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, UC Berkeley

• Soosun You, University of California, Berkeley