The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. We use occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We...

Discriminatory social institutions – formal and informal laws, social norms and practices – restrict women’s rights and empowerment opportunities across 17 West African countries. New laws and measures to protect and promote women’s economic, political and human rights have been...

Les institutions sociales discriminatoires que sont les lois formelles et informelles, normes et pratiques sociales, restreignent les droits et les opportunités d’autonomisation des femmes dans les 17 pays d’Afrique de l’Ouest. De nouvelles lois et mesures sur les droits des femmes et la...

We examine causes and consequences of relative income within households. We show the distribution of the share of income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp drop to the right of 1/2, where the wife's income exceeds the husbands income. We argue that this pattern is best explained by gender...

Gender norms and stereotypes that perpetuate inequality are deeply embedded in social and individual consciousness and, as a result, are resistant to change. Gender stratification theories propose that women's control over material resources can increase bargaining power to leverage change in...

We study the effects of experimental design on male and female behavior in a dictator game. Following social identity theory we investigate how experimental procedure may affect outcome through gender priming, i.e. the activation of gender stereotypes specifying that women behave altruistically...