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On the Origins of Gender Roles:Women and the Plough

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Overview

This paper seeks to establish a negative

relationship between historic plough use and

contemporary female roles.

Based on Boserup (1970)

Tests for transmission of cultural norms and

beliefs across generations

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Bosureps Argument

Two types of cultivation Shifting; labour intensive, makes use of digging sticks,

does not require much effort

Plough; capital intensive, requires much physical effort

With plough cultivation men had an advantage,this developed specialization across gender lines

Men worked on the fields

Women specialized in domestic activities

This led to beliefs about the roles of women insociety which has been passed acrossgenerations.

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Did plough cultivation lead to gender

specialization?

The paper rests on the proposition thatplough cultivation led to specialization acrossgender lines.

Empirical evidence shows that this was thecase.

Negative relationship between plough use andparticipation of women in agricultural activities

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Methodology

Alesina et al. construct district level and

country level measures of historic plough use

combining ethnographic information.

Using those measures, we test Boserups

claim.

We use the following DGP:

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OLS Estimates

Plough: measure of ancient plough use

is a vector of contemporary controls such

as level of GDP. This recognises the fact that

female participation can be influenced by the

level of development of the country.

is a vector of historic controls such as

presence of tropical climate.

is a measure of female involvement

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OLS Results

We find that plough use is negativelycorrelated with

female labour participation

female entreneurship female in politics

This correlation is statistically significant even

after allowing for additional controls such asabsence of private property and majorreligion.

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Problems with OLS

Consistent with other interpretations.

It may be that societies with attitudes towards

gender inequality were more likely to adopt

plough cultivation.

OLS suffers from endogeneity bias.

OLS will be positively biased. Need to instrument historical plough use

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IV estimatesPanel A. Second stage. Dependent variable:

Female labour force

participation Share of firms withsome female ownership Females in PoliticsHistorical plough use -25.853**

(10.051) -26.423**(12.465) -19.939*(11.932) -26.274*(14.439) -16.820*(9.243) -23.089***(12.331)Historical controls Contemporary controls Continent FEs Observations 157 157 104 104 124 124R-squared 0.39 0.43 0.01 0.13 0.17 0.05

Panel B. First stage. Dependent variable: historical plough usePlough-positiveenvironment 0.412***(0.119) 0.377***(0.101) 0.656***(0.150) 0.561***(0.143) 0.401***(0.140) 0.340***(0.117)Plough-negativeenvironment -0.120(0.091) -0.079(0.075) -0.017(0.101) 0.001(0.075) -0.032(0.103) -0.026(0.087)Equality of coefficients 0 0 0 0 0 0F-stat (excludedinstruments) 10.76 7.9 11.68 7.71 5.63 4.54Hausman test (p-value) 0.15 0.19 0.44 0.29 0.18 0.09

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IV Results

We find a significant and negative correlation

between historical plough use and

Female participation in the labour force

Female entrepreneurship

Female in politics

Results consistent with OLS being positively

biased.

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Note on the Hausman test results

The null of the Hausman test is that the OLS

estimates are as good as the IV estimates.

Test of the validity of IV.

We find that we fail to reject the null at

standard levels of significance.

We should use OLS instead as IV is inefficient.

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Thank You!