(whether female respondents and wives of male respondents work outside the home), personal attitudes (level of support for women working) and injunctive norms (incentivized estimates of the extent to which others are supportive of women working). To better understand the motivations that underpin such norms, we also collected information on relevant reference groups (people whose opinion is important to respondents), the concerns that men and women have about women working, and the sanctions they may face, if the wife works outside the home.

We find that respondents’ estimates of the level of support among men for married women with children working outside the home for pay are relatively accurate (unlike Bursztyn et al. (2020)), but both men and women significantly underestimate the extent of women’s support.<sup>3</sup> Men and women also underestimate the extent of support among men for husbands sharing day-to-day childcare responsibilities with wives.<sup>4</sup> Information on which reference groups’ opinions are most important to respondents when deciding whether to work (for women) or, to support their wives working (for men) shows that both men and women are highly concerned about the views of their mothers and mothersin-law when deciding whether they (female respondents) or their wives (male respondents) work. These results underpin the online intervention which we subsequently conducted with more than 4,000 respondents in our second online survey. In our three treatment arms we expose male and female participants to information on the extent of support:

1. among women for women with children working;

2. among men for parents sharing childcare; and 3. among older women (in respondents’ mother’s and mother-in-law’s generation) for women with children working.

All treatment groups receive information on the extent of women’s support for women with children working; treatment group 2 also receives information on the extent of men’s support for shared child care; and treatment group 3 receives all three types of information listed above.

> 3Bursztyn et al. (2023) examine misperceptions of social norms using nationally representative datasets from 60 countries, including Indonesia. They find that Indonesia has one of the lowest shares of support for women having the right to work outside the home (supported by 59% of men and 73% of women). These figures are very similar to the levels of support found in our study - 62% and 76% for men and women respectively. They further find that Indonesians underestimate the level of support for women having the right to work outside the home. The underestimation of women’s support for women working outside the home is 7.9 percentage points (very similar to the average underestimation of 9.4 percentage points in our sample); and of men’s support is 6 percentage points (slightly larger than the 2.5 percentage point underestimate in our sample).

> 4Changing men’s behavior in relation to participating in home production and childcare goes hand-inhand with increasing female labor force participation. Since childcare is still largely a gendered task, changing this norm has the potential to increase women’s ability to search for employment opportunities outside the home.

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