# **1 Introduction**

Over the last thirty years, many countries across the globe have made large investments in the education and health of girls and women. Such investments have, however, not systematically translated into increased participation of women in the labor market. The continuing low economic participation of women in many places is likely due to social norms that emphasize the role of women as mothers and carers. These gender norms - informal societal rules about appropriate or acceptable behavior for women and men - hinder female opportunities, choices, and achievements across the globe. (See for example Alesina et al. (2013); Fernandez (2013); Bertrand et al. (2015); and Jayachandran (2021).) While governments and non-government initiatives can try to change norms through public messaging, there is relatively little known about how effective such campaigns are and how best to influence them. Lack of information on the benefits of women working is one plausible explanation for such norms, but interventions providing information to families to change social norms related to married women’s labor force participation have had mixed success, Dean and Jayachandran (2019) and McKelway (2021).<sup>1</sup> Inaccurate perceptions of support among peers is another possible explanation. Bursztyn et al. (2020) show that in Saudi Arabia correcting underestimates of the extent to which male peers support women working outside the home increased men’s support for working women and increased women’s labor force participation.<sup>2</sup> Aloud et al. (2020), also in Saudi Arabia, find that informing female students of the labor market aspirations of their peers increases expectations about their own labor force participation. Cort ́es et al. (2012) find that individuals in the US also systematically overestimate gender conservativeness in relation to labor supply of mothers with young children, and that once information on peer beliefs is provided they are more likely to donate towards organizations advocating for women in the workplace.

In this paper we build on the literature examining the role of misperceptions of support among peers. We report the results of two data collection exercises. First, an online survey which was designed to measure and enhance our understanding of social norms around women’s work in Indonesia. Specifically, we collected information from approximately 500 female and 500 male respondents in metropolitan areas across Indonesia on their behavior

> 1Dean and Jayachandran (2019) and McKelway (2021) evaluate interventions in India which provided information on female employment opportunities and/or the benefits of female employment. Both found very little change in the acceptability of women working. Makino (forthcoming) however found that havingparents of young women in Pakistan attend a two-hour lecture which provided information on the safe,female-friendly working environment in large garment factories made parents more positive about theirdaughters working in factories. Interventions targeting adolescents in India have also had some successin changing gender attitudes (see Dhar et al. (2022)).

> 2While not designed to change social norms, Field et al. (2021) show that male attitudes towards female work and their beliefs about community acceptance of women working were shifted by an intervention that resulted in women receiving wages into their own bank account rather than their husband’s account. This shift was hypothesized to come about due to the consequent increase in women’s household bargaining power.

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