Women's Liberation: What's in It for Men?

Abstract

The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic improvements in the legal rights of married women. Given that these changes took place long before women gained the right to vote, they amounted to a voluntary renouncement of power by men. In this paper, we investigate men's incentives for sharing power with women. In our model, women's legal rights set the marital bargaining power of husbands and wives. We show that men face a tradeoff between the rights they want for their own wives (namely none) and the rights of other women in the economy. Men prefer other men's wives to have rights because men care about their own daughters and because an expansion of women's rights increases educational investments in children. We show that men may agree to relinquish some of their power once technological change increases the importance of human capital. We corroborate our argument with historical evidence on the expansion of women's rights in England and the United States.

The Intergenerational Transmission of Gender Role Attitudes and its Implications for Female Labour Force Participation

“…Collectively, our results suggest that the progressive shift towards less traditional views among younger cohorts is likely to positively affect women's labour market opportunities for future generations. Our findings are also consistent with the recent literature that highlights the importance of men's attitudes for women's social and economic advances (Doepke and Tertilt 2009;Ferna´ndez 2011). Accordingly, the strong correlation that we uncover between men's attitudes and the labour supply of women suggests that policies aimed at increasing labour market participation that exclusively target women can fail to fully achieve their intended goals.…”

Women Empowerment and Economic Development

“…Doepke and Tertilt (2009) show a robust negative correlation of 0.4 or higher across countries between the lack of rights and GDP per capita. Historically, the expansion of economic rights to women in the United States and Europe preceded their access to political rights (Doepke and Tertilt 2009;Fernandez 2009). While it is of course impossible to infer causality from the data, two lines of argument suggest why economic growth could lead men to willingly surrender economic rights to their wives.…”

“…While it is of course impossible to infer causality from the data, two lines of argument suggest why economic growth could lead men to willingly surrender economic rights to their wives. Doepke and Tertilt (2009) argue that, when the importance of human capital in the economy increases (with technological progress), men start to be willing to surrender some rights to women to ensure that children get better educated (the argument requires that women care more about children's human capital and that bargaining power matter for household decisions, which we will discuss below). The trade-off is between their utility today and the utility of their offspring (children, grandchildren, and future generations).…”

Gender and competition

“…And for those who are interested in understanding how we arrived at this point, so too do the political economy approaches as exemplified in the studies by, inter alia, John Stuart Mill (1869), Lizzeri and Persico (2004) and Doepke and Tertilt (2008). There remains much work to be done by labour economists in exploring the ways in which gender plays out in the labour market.…”