Overall, there is a small but significant difference in perceived control across genders. This difference decreases but remains significant once demographic differences between men and women – in particular income, education and employment status – are accounted for.<sup>15</sup> Column (3) shows that the positive relationship between perceived control and income holds at the country group classification-level. The gender gap in perceived freedom of choice and control does not change substantially once we control for fixed country factors.

By improving our understanding of gender differences and other significantly related characteristics, the analysis above demonstrates the usefulness of an abbreviated measure of sense of agency such as the perceived control scale. However, as with many simple measures of complex constructs, there is debate in the literature on what this direct measurement of agent-ends relationships captures, and how it relates to measures of agent-means (self-efficacy) and means-ends (locus of control) relationships. For example, although the scale above should capture both kinds of control constructs, it is usually presented as an abbreviated way to capture an individual’s locus of control (e.g., Kelley and Stack 2000; Pitlik et al. 2015), especially in the US literature. To our knowledge, the relationship between the sense of agency scale and locus of control has only been tested indirectly through proxies. For example, Verne (2009) concludes that the scale captures one’s locus of control by comparing responses to importance attributed to child obedience (assuming this would be most appreciated by individuals with an external locus of control) vs. the importance attributed to child independence (assuming this would be most appreciated with individuals with an internal locus of control).

We use the fifth wave of the World Values survey, conducted between 2005 and 2009, to examine the relationship between the two constructs. In this wave, the WVS added another question which is conceptually very closely aligned to locus of control:

**(B)** “ _Some people believe that individuals can decide their own destiny, while others think that it is impossible to escape a predetermined fate. Using the following scale where 1 means everything in life is determined by fate and 10 means people shape their fate themselves, please indicate which comes closest to your view_ ”.

This question was asked in 49 of the 58 countries included in the fifth wave.<sup>16</sup> We calculate Spearman's rank correlation coefficient to determine the strength of association between responses to the

> 15The results do not substantially change if being married is re-coded to include “living together married” or religiosity is defined as “importance of religion” (A006) instead of “importance of God in your life”. These robustness checks are available upon request. 16Excluded countries are Colombia, France, Guatemala, Hong Kong SAR of China, Iraq, Netherlands, New Zealand, the Russian Federation and Great Britain. This wave also includes a second scale: “I see myself as an autonomous individual” on a 1-4 Likert scale (1= Strongly agree, 2= Agree, 3=Disagree, 4= Strongly disagree). We focus on the fate scale as little theoretical or empirical

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