He for she? Variation and exaggeration in men's support for women's empowerment in northern Tanzania

Abstract

Achieving gender equality fundamentally requires a transfer of power from men to women. Yet data on men's support for women's empowerment (WE) remains scant and limited by reliance on self-report methodologies. Here, we examine men's support for WE as sexual conflict trait, both via direct surveys (n=590) and indirectly by asking men's wives (n=317) to speculate on their husband's views. Data come from a semiurban community in Mwanza, Tanzania. Consistent with reduced resource competition and increased exposure to relatively egalitarian gender norms, higher socioeconomic status predicted greater support for WE. However, potential demographic indicators of sexual conflict (high fertility, polygyny, large spousal age gap) were largely unrelated to men's support for WE. Contrasting self and wife-reported measures suggests men frequently exaggerate their support for women in self-reported attitudes. Discrepancies were especially pronounced among men claiming the highest support for WE, but smallest among men who held a professional occupation and whose wife participated in wage labor, indicating these factors predict genuine support for WE. We discuss the implications of these results for our understanding of both individual variation and patriarchal gender norms, emphasizing the benefits of greater exchange between the evolutionary human sciences and global health research on these themes.

Positive Correlation Between Women’s Status and Intimate Partner Violence Suggests Violence Backlash in Mwanza, Tanzania

“…Only a handful of eligible couples refused to take part (3.7% of all couples contacted). Further information on sampling can be found in Lawson et al, 2021b.…”

“…Women also frequently self-report greater acceptance of IPV than men, particularly in regions where IPV is most prevalent; indicating that men often hide their true attitudes as they are aware of the socially desirable response (Sardinha & Nájera Catalán, 2018; Tran et al, 2016; Uthman et al, 2009). Therefore, we chose a priori to rely on wives’ reports on their husbands’ attitudes, as we believe this best limits the impact of social desirability bias and provides a more reliable measure of husband’s condonement of IPV (for further justification of our approach see Lawson et al, 2021b). Wives’ responses were used to form a binary measure of husband’s condonement of IPV; the variable is coded 1 if women reported that their husbands would agree or strongly agree with either statement and 0 otherwise.…”

“…We chose this approach as there is a growing consensus that social desirability bias is a significant limitation of existing work measuring men’s attitudes relating to women’s empowerment (Charles, 2018; Lawoko, 2008; Levtov et al, 2014; Schuler et al, 2010; Vaillant et al, 2020). This is indicated, for example, by the tendency for men to self-report notably higher support for women’s empowerment than indicated by asking wives to speculate on their husbands’ views, especially when reporting on sensitive topics like IPV (Lawson et al, 2021b). Women also frequently self-report greater acceptance of IPV than men, particularly in regions where IPV is most prevalent; indicating that men often hide their true attitudes as they are aware of the socially desirable response (Sardinha & Nájera Catalán, 2018; Tran et al, 2016; Uthman et al, 2009).…”

“…The 2018 HDSS census was used as a sampling frame to identify married couples with at least one child in which the man was projected to be between the ages of 25-40. These criteria reflect the wider purposes of our survey (see Lawson et al, 2021b), but also serve to eliminate infertility as a potential confounder in analyses of IPV (Stieglitz et al, 2018). The HDSS identified 1275 eligible married couples that fit the criteria, of which we initially intended to randomly sample 400; with these targets reflecting maximum samples in light of time, budgetary constraints, and expected levels of missingness (due to difficulties in locating and recruiting participants).…”

Why marry early? Parental influence, agency and gendered conflict in Tanzanian marriages

“…Education was lower among those married early, but community members reported strong taboos against marrying school girls, suggesting that school dropout generally precedes marriages, rather than marriage taking girls out of school (Schaffnit, Hassan, et al, 2019). Consistent with gendered conflict, women report marrying somewhat older men than they would ideally prefer, but relatively larger husband-older spousal age gap was not predictive of marital stability or women's self-reported autonomy in decision making, self-reported experience of depression or reproductive success (Lawson, Schaffnit, Kilgallen et al, 2021).…”