Does Individualism Promote Gender Equality?

We argue that individualism promotes gender equality. Individualist values of autonomy and self-determination transcend gender identities and serve to legitimize women's goals and choices. In contrast, collectivist values may subordinate women's personal goals to their social obligations, generating greater acceptance of gender inequality. Using individual level data from World Values Surveys, we find empirical support for our hypothesis. Individualism is significantly associated with support for gender equality in key domains of life, including employment, income, education, and political leadership. In addition, individualism is associated with greater levels of female employment, higher levels of female education attainment, and lower levels of total fertility. Using instrumental variable analysis, we find evidence that the exogenous portion of individualism reduces gender inequality and the gender division of labor. These effects are also economically large. Our results are robust to controlling for income, education, religion, historical plough usage, and country and time fixed effects. Our within country analysis allows us to isolate the impact of individualism from other confounding effects