Tackling Gender Discriminatory Inheritance Law Privately : Lessons from a Survey Experiment in Tunisia

When reform of gender discriminatory law fails, individual action can offer a second-best solution. As most Muslim-majority countries, Tunisia applies Islamic inheritance law, systematically favoring sons over daughters. By making gifts to their daughter, parents can privately attenuate gender discrimination in inheritance. This study investigates to what extent gifting can represent an alternative to legal reform and for whom. Within a randomized experiment, this study tests whether providing information on public support for inheritance law reform and/or the possibility to make a gift to one's daughter has a causal impact on individual attitudes towards women's right to inheritance. The overall evidence on the effectiveness of the proposed informational treatments to encourage gifting is mixed. However, approval of gifting daughters is high--especially among the wealthy. Men are more likely to gift than women. By contrast, demand for legal reform is significantly higher among women and individuals with low educational attainment. The findings thus suggest that gifting indeed represents an alternative to legal reform; but mostly for a relatively well-off subset of the population, leaving the agency to the traditionally male head of the family