April 2023
April 2023 - research on violence and the patriarchy, misperceptions of support for gender equality, and polarization
Welcome to the April 2023 edition of the Gender & Politics Research newsletter, written by Bhumi Purohit and Annabelle Hutchinson. We use this newsletter to summarize some of recently published research on gender and politics. We’d love to hear about the work you are doing - send it our way!
We’re gearing up for the Midwest Political Science Conference this week. Are you presenting at MPSA? We’d love to hear about it! Send us your panels so we can highlight them. We hope to see many of you in Chicago!
- Annabelle and Bhumi
James Adams, David Bracken, Noam Gidron, Will Horne, Diana Z O’Brien, Kaitlin Senk. 2023. “Can’t We All Just Get Along? How Women MPs Can Ameliorate Affective Polarization in Western Publics” American Political Science Review.
There has been a great deal of concern and research on understanding affective polarization in the US and other western democracies. This paper investigates whether the gender makeup of parties can change affective polarization. Specifically, this paper “posit[s] that partisans more warmly evaluate out-parties with higher proportions of women members of parliament (MPs).” (As an aside, the suggestion that voters/people may prefer women candidates is backed up by lots of experimental research showing that voters tend to prefer hypothetical women candidates in candidate choice experiments - see Schwarz and Coppock 2022.)
Using a lot of data - a dataset on women’s presence in the parliamentary delegations of 125 political parties in 20 Western democracies between 1996 and 2017 combined with Comparative Study of Electoral Systems survey data on partisans’ affective party ratings - the authors find that, yes, more women in parties’ parliamentary delegations = less partisan hostility.
“We show that women’s representation is associated with lower levels of partisan hostility and that both men and women partisans react positively to out-party women MPs. Increasing women’s parliamentary presence could thus mitigate cross-party hostility.”
Elin Bjarnegård, Anders Engvall, Srisompob Jitpiromsri, and Erik Melander. 2023. “Armed Violence and Patriarchal Values: A Survey of Young Men in Thailand and Their Military Experiences.” American Political Science Review, 117(2): 439 - 453.
Who takes up arms during violent conflicts? In recent work, some have suggested that support for violent extremism may be correlated with ideas of masculinity and gender inequality (see Bjarnegård and Melander 2017; Bjarnegård, Brounéus and Melander 2019; Johnston and True 2019; Johnston and True 2020; and Johnston, True, Gordon, Chilmeran and Riveros-Morales 2020). The authors build this work by providing both correlational and causal evidence. They find that men with more patriarchal values are more likely to volunteer for paramilitary service in Thailand (correlational survey evidence). They also test for reverse causality—that military service leads to patriarchal values—using conscription lotteries as a natural experiment); they find that mandatory military service in a conflict zone does not cause patriarchal values.
Martina Björkman Nyqvist, Seema Jayachandran, and Céline Zipfel. 2023. “A Mother’s Voice: Impacts of Spousal Communication Training on Child Health Investments.” MISUM Working Paper Series, No. 2023-13, Feb 2023.
This working paper studies whether increasing women’s decision-making voice in the household boosts children’s health and nutrition. The intuition behind the question is that in many households within strongly patriarchal contexts, women may have stronger preferences for investing resources in children, but they may lack household decision-making power vis-à-vis men in the household. Providing them with a way to have more say in the household may lead to greater decision-making power. The authors test three interventions in an RCT in 4 districts of SW Uganda:
Offering health classes to only fathers, providing them with information on how to improve children’s health and well-being
Offering health classes to only mothers, providing them with information on how to improve children’s health and well-being
Offering health classes to only mothers, providing them with information on how to improve children’s health and well-being and training them on assertive communication
Two of the authors—Nyqvist and Jayachandran—summarize the differences between treatment 1 and treatment 2 in a separate paper (spoiler: training mothers improved child outcomes much more than training fathers). This paper focuses on the differences between the second and third treatments—the effect of communication training. They nicely summarize their five key findings:
Women reported improvements in their relationship with their husbands (they communicated better with their husbands, had fewer arguments, said husbands were more likely to talk about the household’s finances, and more likely to make joint decisions). Yet, men didn’t report the same improvements in their relationships with women.
Women were more likely to discuss health and nutrition with their husbands, but these talks didn’t increase husband’s knowledge of child health. It could be that women discussed family health more generally, but not what they learned in the intervention. Or it could be that the husbands just didn’t listen.
Adding communication training didn’t increase households’ overall adoption of health-promoting behaviors compared to just the health training.
While most household budget items didn’t change, the communication training increased household spending on meat and fish — something women could have used their assertive communication training on.
There were no impacts on downstream child health outcomes (such as weight-for-height, height-for-age, mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC), hemoglobin levels or the number of days children were sick) between the 2nd and 3rd treatment arms.
Leonardo Bursztyn, Alexander W. Cappelen, Bertil Tungodden, Alessandra Voena, and David Yanagizawa-Drott. March 2023. “How Are Gender Norms Perceived?” Working Paper.
Are you ready to see some data from a whopping 80% of the world’s population? Then read this one. This paper examines actual vs. perceived norms (acceptable behavior that is understood by people within a group) on two policies: allowing women to work outside the home and affirmative action policies for hiring women in leadership positions.
Actual norms vs. perceptions of norms are important; mismatch between the two may motivate people to act in a certain way but correcting a perceived norm to the reality can change that behavior. For instance, Bursztyn, Gonzalez and Yanagizawa-Drott (2020) show that in Saudi Arabia, men privately support women being employed outside the home, but wrongly think others do not. When the researchers correct this misperception, they see increased propensity of women applying and interviewing for jobs in their study.
So back to this study - what are the actual gender norms for the two aforementioned policies? The figure below (figure 2 from the paper) shows the distribution, with panel (a) showing support for women’s right to work and panel (b) showing support for affirmative action. Splitting the data by the gender equality index of each country, they find that places with the lowest level of gender equity also show the lowest level of support for basic rights for women. For affirmative action, they find the opposite - countries with less gender equality are much more likely to support affirmative action for women then countries with more gender equality.
Are these actual norms aligned with perceptions of norms for both policies? Figure 5 from the paper, shown below, estimates misperceptions for basic rights in panel (a) and misperceptions for affirmative action in panel (b). They summarize the data as follows (pg. 22):
Support for basic rights in the population is universally underestimated
Support for affirmative action is on average underestimated in low gender
equality countries and overestimated in high gender equality countries
Next, the authors look at the gap between men and women’s beliefs for women’s basic right to work (94.4% women support versus 88.2% men) and affirmative action for women (73.1% women support versus 60% men). When comparing actual vs. perceived norms, they find the following (pg. 22):
Men’s support for women’s right to work is more underestimated than
women’s support for their own right to work, essentially everywhereMen’s support for affirmative action for women is more underestimated
than women’s support the affirmative action in all countries.In low gender equality countries, both men’s and women’s support are on average underestimated, while in high gender equality countries women’s support is overestimated and men’s support is not misperceived.
Why do misperceptions exist? The authors posit some reasons: that people tend to overestimate the size of the minority group that against the policy; and that people tend to be gender sterotypical by up-weighting women’s support for policies and down-weighting men’s support for policies.
These facts give us a wealth of knowledge to start thinking of interventions that might correct misperceptions and in the process, improve support for women’s right to work and affirmative action.
David Card, Sefano DellaVigna, Patricia Funk, and Nagore Iriberri. 2023. “Gender gaps at the academies” PNAS.
Do female researchers receive the same recognition as their male colleagues? This paper investigates the likelihood that female researchers and male researchers are elected to the National Academy of Science (NAS) and the American Academy of Arts and Science (AAAS). The authors only use data on three fields - psychology, mathematics, and economics. This analysis does not include data on political scientists, but is interesting for gender and politics scholars regardless.
The paper finds that the likelihood of women being elected as members (controlling for publications and citations) has changed over time, and that women are more likely to be elected today. (For those that are wondering, the authors do control for research productivity via publications and citations in high-impact journals. The authors note that “We caution that our estimates are subject to the criticism that female researchers may face a harder time publishing in top journals or receiving credit for their work. In fact, there is some evidence in the recent literature of such barriers.”)
“In the early years of our sample, women were less likely to be selected as members than men with similar records. By the 1990s, the selection process at both academies was approximately gender neutral, conditional on publications and citations. In the past 20 years, however, a positive preference for female members has emerged and strengthened in all three fields. Currently, women are 3 to 15 times more likely to be selected as members of the AAAS and NAS than men with similar publication and citation records. The positive preference for women may be in part a reflection of concerns that women face higher barriers to publishing in top journals and may receive less credit for their work.”