David Yanagizawa-Drott
Professor of Development and Emerging Markets
Zurich ZCED
Custom in Saudi Arabia holds that male guardians, such as husbands and fathers, play a key role in deciding whether women may work outside the home – a social norm that helps to explain the country’s low rates of female employment. This project reports evidence that most Saudi men privately believe that women should be allowed to work, but that they also underestimate the extent to which other men share their views. Experiments reveal that when men are informed that other men agree about women and work, they are more open to the idea of letting their wives take a job. Wives of men whose misperceptions about the acceptability of female employment have been corrected are more likely to apply and be interviewed for a job.
In this project, we combine experiments and surveys to first provide incentivized evidence that the majority of married men in Saudi Arabia in fact support female labor force participation outside of home, while they substantially underestimate the level of support for female labor force participation by other men – even those from their same social setting, such as neighbors. We then show that randomly correcting these beliefs about others increases married men’s willingness to let their wives join the labor force (as measured by their costly sign-up for a mobile job-matching service for their wives). Finally, we find that this decision maps onto real outcomes: three to five months after the main intervention, the wives of men in our original sample whose beliefs about acceptability of female labor force participation were corrected are more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job outside of home.
Professor of Development and Emerging Markets
Zurich ZCED
University of Chicago
University of Chicago