# Association between social norms and women’s employment

This sub-section examines whether and the extent to which decisions about women’s work for pay outside the home may be influenced by personal beliefs, social empirical and normative expectations, and perceptions of sanctions for not conforming to norms across the two themes explored in this study.

Bivariate regressions reported in **<u>Table A.9, Annex A</u>** show that the association between personal beliefs and social expectations and the outcome of interest (women’s work for pay) are in the direction we hypothesized, i.e., more conservative norms are associated with lower participation of females in paid work outside the home For example, on a scale of 0-1, with 1 being the most conservative, going from most liberal to most conservative in one’s personal belief that a woman should not work for pay outside the home is associated with an average 15 percentage points lower probability of the woman working for pay outside the home. Similarly, going from most liberal to most conservative in one’s social expectations about the proportion of reference group members who do not approve of women working for pay and the proportion of other women who do not work for pay reduces the probability of a woman working by 16 percentage points and 21 percentage points, respectively. The only exception is the motherhood norm, where beliefs and expectations do not correlate with women’s work outcomes.

However, important differences emerge across the two themes as well as between male and female respondents. First, beliefs that relate to traditional gender roles for men and women in the household tend to correlate with women’s work status more so than the beliefs around women in public spaces. Social norms – both empirical and normative expectations – appear to correlate with women’s work status when work challenges gender traditional roles. This is also true for social expectations specifically around women working outside the home for pay, but it is not the case with most other dimensions of women in public places. Second, social sanctions, which are relatively low to begin with, are not correlated with women’s work status, with the exception of when households breach the male provider norm. For both men and women, higher expected severity of social sanctions on the male breadwinner role is associated with a lower probability of the woman working.

Overall, women's personal beliefs and social expectations are more significantly correlated with their work status as compared to their spouses’. For men, social expectations rarely correlate with their spouses’ work status, with the exception of empirical expectations about other women working for pay outside the home and working in mixed-gender environments. Their personal beliefs also correlate less with women’s work status and do not appear to matter when it comes to beliefs about appropriateness of women working outside the home and about men’s provider role.

When we analyze the individual level predictors of women’s work outcomes ( **Table 5** ), we find that for norms around household roles, personal beliefs, rather than social expectations tend to be more strongly correlated with women’s work status. Going from most liberal to most conservative in the PNB index for household roles is associated with an average 8 percentage points lower probability of women working for pay outside the home. In contrast, when it comes to norms around women in the public space (column 2) associations with personal beliefs and social normative expectations are not statistically significant. These results also hold when variables across both themes are considered in the same regression specification. For male respondents, however, even their own beliefs do not appear to influence employment outcomes of their spouses.<sup>29</sup> Overall, these findings suggest that mainly women’s own beliefs around gender roles influence women’s employment outcomes, and that there is limited social disapproval expected towards women who participate

> 29 The same regressions were run without any controls, the results for which are reported in **<u>Table A.11, Annex A</u>** .

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