In today’s developed countries, by and large, women enjoy the same legal rights as men. This has not always been the case. Two hundred years ago, in most countries, women were considered property of men (typically either a father or a husband) and had no intrinsic rights of their own. They usually could not own property or sign contracts, they had no control over their own body, they could not vote, they had no legal way to end a marriage, and they had no access to their children after a separation. What explains the expansion of women’s rights since? And what was the economic impact of these changes? In this paper, we provide a survey of the economics and politics of women’s rights. We focus on legal rights to emphasize the distinction between equality in oppor-tunity as opposed to equality in outcomes. Men and women are different, and hence gender differences in outcomes such as labor force participation, life expectancy, or political involvement should not be surprising. For example, even a small comparative advantage of women in child-rearing may lead to an optimal division of labor in which many women specialize in home production (Becker 1991). Inequalities in outcomes do not necessarily imply that women are disadvantaged. However, if formal rights are gender-specific, then women are denied the same opportunities as men. A large literature on gender differences in outcomes exists, whereas the formal rights of women have received increasing attention only recently. We start by documenting the salient facts on women’s rights in relation to eco-nomic development. In contemporary cross-country data, measures of women’s rights and development are highly correlated. The fact that women in today’s least developed countries have the least legal rights might suggest that rights will expand naturally once economic development takes hold, just as they did in developed countries. However, there are important differences between to-day’s poor countries and the historical situation in rich countries. Focusing on the cases of the United States and England, we show that the historical expansion of women’s rights unfolded through distinct stages: basic economic rights came first, political rights were next, and equal treatment in the labor market and greater control over their own body ultimately followed. In contrast, in most African countries women gained formal political rights (as part of the end of colonialism) before obtaining economic rights. Moreover, there are many specific traditions (such as foot binding, child marriage, and witch killings) affecting the rights of women that are specific to certain cultures. Contemporary phenomena, such as HIV/AIDS, sex-selective abortions, and international sex trafficking also represent challenges to gender equality that was not present in earlier time periods (Kristof and WuDunn 2009). After reviewing the facts, we describe the economic consequences of women’s rights. The bulk of the literature focuses on the effects of property (often land) rights for women. In line with economic intuition, a number of empirical studies find that more rights lead to a redistribution of resources towards women and higher investment in both physical and human capital. Some studies find a decrease in fertility when women obtain more economic rights. Further, equality in the division of marital assets tends to decrease female labor force participation. There is also research on the economic consequences of including women in politics through suffrage and gender quotas. The main finding here is that when women are involved in politics, both as voters and as policymakers, the composition of government spending shifts towards higher expenditures related to health and children. Some studies also find an overall increase in government expenditures, but here the evidence is less robust. Finally, improvements in women’s control over their own body seem to increase their career prospects and life satisfaction, and may positively affect female bargaining power in the household. The political-economy literature on the origins of women’s rights is
relatively small. Why were women’s rights changed as economic growth took hold? Con-sidering that women are physically weaker than men, it is not surprising that ini-tially men dominated society and chose to endow women with an inferior legal position. What is more puzzling is that men ultimately gave up their control over women. Recent literature tries to understand the economic forces behind the expansion in women’s rights. The forces can be grouped into two broad categories. On the one hand, general cultural changes may have changed male attitudes towards women’s rights. On the other hand, technological change may have altered men’s economic incentives for extending rights to women. We discuss evidence for each of these explanations. While culture may have played some in-dependent role, the existing explanations suggest that technological change may have driven both cultural attitudes about women’s rights and the expansion of rights itself. The findings on the consequences and origins of women’s rights suggest that causality between economic development and women’s rights runs in both di-rections. We conclude our survey by discussing the theory of Doepke and Tertilt (2009), which captures the feedback between economics and politics in a model where human-capital driven growth and the expansion of women’s rights mutu-ally reinforce each other. In the model, men initially have all the power, but they can vote to endow women with economic rights that give them more bargaining power in marriage. As voters, men face a tradeoff between the bargaining power of their own wife (which they would prefer to be low) and the bargaining power of other men’s wives (which they would prefer to be high). There are two differ-ent reasons why men would like women other than their own wife to have power. First, since women attach more weight to the future well-being of their children, empowering women leads to faster human capital accumulation. Men benefit from a general rise in education, because education levels under patriarchy are inefficiently low. Second, men more specifically would like their own daughters to have rights, so as to protect them from exploitation by their husbands. Doepke and Tertilt show that men’s incentives to support women’s rights depend on the return to education. Thus, technological change that increases the demand for human capital can endogenously trigger female empowerment. Conversely, once women have rights human capital accumulation speeds up, even more, implying that political change feeds back into economic development. In the next section, we give an overview of the basic facts on women’s rights across countries and throughout history. In Section 3, we discuss the economic consequences of various forms of women’s rights. Section 4 takes a political-economy perspective to analyze the driving forces behind changes in women’s rights. In Section 5, we review the theory of Doepke and Tertilt (2009), where skill-biased technical change drives both economic development and the expansion of women’s rights. Section 6 concludes.
Keyword: Social Responsibility, Business Environment
Matthias Doepkey
Michele` Tertilt z
Alessandra Voenax