# **Appendix D: Gender Norms in the Future of Business Survey**

In the December 2019 Future of Business Survey, we included a set of questions to business owners and managers on Facebook to capture beliefs and norms towards gender equality.

- i. Individual Beliefs: Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: “ _Men and women should have equal opportunities._ ” from strongly agree, agree, disagree or strongly disagree.

- ii. Perceived Community Norm: Out of 10 of your neighbors, how many do you think believe that men and women should have equal opportunities?

The sample included data from 108 countries with at least 30 female respondents. In this paper we use these norms constructs for the 52 countries in our analysis to examine whether the more gender conservative/liberal societies helped mitigate or exacerbate the gendered economic impacts of the COVID19 crisis for businesses.

Graphs D1 and D2 present the individual beliefs for men and women separately to show the percentage of people in a country that agree or strongly agree with the gender equality statement versus the average perceived community norm aggregated at the country level. Overall, the surveyed female and male entrepreneurs’ own beliefs about gender equality tend to be more progressive than what they believe their community thinks about gender equality. The distance between the individual belief and the community norm may capture to a degree the level of misperception of the norm at the country level or perhaps the entrepreneurs sampled by the FoB survey may have more progressive beliefs than the communities that surround them. Countries in graphs D1 and D2 have been sorted by the level of the gap between individual beliefs and the perceived norm. For example, Norway has the smallest gap between individual and community norm for both men and women and Iraq has the largest gap. In Iraq, while 89% of women entrepreneurs surveyed agreed that men and women should have equal opportunities, they perceive that only 33% of their community would agree with the gender equality statement. Similarly, for Iraqi male entrepreneurs 77% agree that men and women should have equal opportunities and perceive that only 38% of their community would agree with the gender equality statement. In graph D3 we show the overall correlation between individual beliefs and the community norm for male and female entrepreneurs. We show that there is a linear relationship whereby the more progressive the country is in terms of individual beliefs, the higher is the community perceived norm. A simple correlation coefficient tells us that this relationship is stronger for men (rho:75) than for women (rho:43).

In graph D4 we examine how men and women differ in their beliefs and norms. The line is the 45-degree line that shows where there is equality between the norm variable measured for women (vertical axis) and the norm measured for men (horizontal axis). Countries on the 45-degree line are those in which the norms are the most similar between men and women. Overall, community perceptions about gender equality are more similar among women and men and have a higher correlation coefficient (rho:0.85) compared to the individual beliefs of men and women (rho:0.61). In general, in the majority of countries women’s individual beliefs are skewed to the left of men’s individual beliefs – that is, women have on average more progressive views than men in the sample. In terms of perceived community norms, the panel on the right of graph D4 suggest that men and women in the sample have very similar beliefs i.e. most countries are very close to the 45-degree line.

In the next section we use a similar measure of gender equality from the World Values Survey (WVS) that draws from a representative sample from a country’s population to show that the ranking of gender progressiveness across countries for the sample in the Future of Business survey is similar to the ranking from a general population from the WVS.

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