Event Summary: ‘A Woman’s Work is Never Done’ – How Gender Norms Enable Labor Coercion, Inside and Outside the Home

By Vidhu Mukundan
On Thursday, March 28, Rohini Pande, renowned economist and the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center, Yale University, presented the 2024 Paul Streeten Distinguished Lecture in Global Development Policy. Pande’s lecture shared novel research examining how gender norms can enable female labor coercion within and outside the home, with evidence from India.
The lecture opened with introductory remarks from Stan Sclaroff, Professor and Dean of the Boston University College of Arts and Sciences, as well as Daniele Paserman, Professor of Economics with the BU Department of Economics. Rachel Brulé, Associate Director and Core Faculty Member of the Human Capital Initiative (HCI) at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center and an Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, presided over the discussion and audience Q&A.
Pande began by pointing to BU Professor Paul Streeten’s legacy in policy-oriented research, who urged researchers to think of basic needs as basic rights. Especially in the context of this lecture, Pande asked about the politics of basic needs for women, pointing to Streeten’s comment that “The pleas of the women’s liberation movement are in conflict with the pleas of those who call for an improvement in the specifically feminine roles of wife and mother.”
Her lecture examined how conservative gender norms have been weaponized to uphold male dominance both inside and outside the home, citing disparities in paid and unpaid labor between men and women, mobile cell phone usage and other indicators of personal liberties.
How are conservative gender norms weaponized to uphold male dominance inside and outside the home?
Using evidence from India, Pande argued that gendered social norms coerce and confine married women to household work. Firstly, she pointed out that men’s labor force participation is higher relative to women’s. While this pattern is similar across countries, female labor force participation shows high levels of variation across contexts. For example, in India, the female labor force participation sits under 30 percent.
To provide deeper insight, Pande used World Bank data to show that these levels have not improved with higher rates of economic growth. Furthermore, using India’s National Sample Survey Office Time Use 2019 Survey, she shows how women, married and unmarried, devote more of their time towards to unpaid work relative to men. Married women are reported to spend 399 minutes per day on unpaid domestic and caregiving work and 71 minutes per day on paid work, whereas married men are reported to spend 46 minutes per day on unpaid domestic and caregiving work and 378 minutes per day on paid work. Therefore, Pande argued that the gender gap is not in the time spent per day in working, but in money earned for that labor.
Is time spent on paid versus unpaid work linked to marriage? Pande pointed to the diverging trends of employment status with age in India, where for men, marriage (with age) does not change labor market outcomes, whereas marriage for women is much more closely correlated with not entering the labor market at all. Supporting studies from Pande’s 2017 survey in Madhya Pradesh show that this is a result of social norms restricting women’s economic mobility.
What sustains gendered division of labor?
Pande argued that social norms sustain the gendered divisions of labor within and outside the home. She links marriage coercion with social norms, using Acemoglu and Wolitzky’s model of labor coercion, wherein a laborer’s willingness to accept a contract with conditions that are objectively unfavorable under force or the threat of the force. She argued that gender norms enable families and women to accept marriage contracts that result in uneven burdens of unpaid domestic and caregiving work. A moral imperative framing or narrative of the ‘good woman,’ who accepts the marital contract and the uneven care burden as the ‘right’ thing to do, perpetuates these norms. Furthermore, Pande noted that these norms also enable physical and social punishment of women who deviate from this moral narrative.
Limiting outside options: Social norms before and after marriage for women
Citing existing studies, Pande showed that pre-marriage norms for women and girls like remaining “chaste and pure for future husbands,” adopting a subservient manner, adhering to arranged marriages and supervised mobile phone usage limits women’s agency, physical mobility, social and labor market connections. Pande’s own research based on the 2012 India Human Development Survey shows that at and after puberty, mobile phone usage for girls plateaus and then decreases with age, indicating that either girls do not use their own phones as they grow older or that they have to share the usage of mobile phones with family. On the other hand, boys’ cell phone usage increases steadily with age.
Pande’s team used in-depth interviews with 98 women and 27 men across rural and urban areas of India that cover the south, east, center and north of the country to understand norms regarding women’s mobile phone ownership and usage. Common themes that emerged from these interviews highlight that mobiles phones are seen to impact women’s community reputations by increasing their social networks and de-emphasizing their role as caregivers and subservient members of the household. Furthermore, Pande related these norms about women’s mobile phone usage with enabling both physical punishment and social sanction of “norm non-compliant” women.
Using Demographic and Health Survey data for India from 2019-2021, Pande made two striking observations: just 20 percent of the 60,000 women surveyed reported that they were “never afraid” of their husband, while over 20 percent of the women surveyed justified a husband beating his wife for not complying with household gendered norms by engaging in behavior like neglecting children, going out without telling the husband, not cooking food properly and other similar infractions. What is more, the number of women justifying domestic violence was greater for women whose social networks were limited by their family (for some categories, it was as high as 37 percent), relative to women whose social networks were not limited.
Can improving outside options for women effect change?
From a randomized experiment in 2017, Pande and researchers compared outcomes for women who were employed in public sector jobs with different levels of control over their earnings in the form of opening bank accounts for women, receiving direct deposits into their individual bank accounts and receiving training on how to use these bank accounts, among other treatments. The results showed that after three years, women who received direct deposits and were trained in using their bank accounts had higher labor supply in both public and private sectors. Additionally, in a follow-up survey conducted after eight years, the interventions were found to have had a liberalizing impact on women’s own perceptions of gender norms on whether they think women should be allowed to work outside the home, among other norms. However, women’s perceptions of their communities were shown to grow more conservative with time, indicating that normative backlash may be limiting liberalized women’s opportunities for development.
Pande therefore stresses the importance of not only individual-level interventions for women, but also targeted interventions at the community level to disrupt gender norms that socially sanction “non-compliant” women. Pande further discussed another randomized control trial where a pre-election scheme by the government in rural Chhattisgarh, India involved distributing mobile phones to eligible women, where only half of them received training on how to use the devices. Pande found that women that received the mobile phones and were trained in their usage showed greater indications of individual ownership, greater social connections and better mental health, as opposed to women who received mobile phones without the training.
In concluding her remarks, Pande emphasized the implications of her work. She noted that powerful economic incentives that provide women the opportunity to participate in the labor market and encourage their financial independence may make a dent in prevailing gender norms, but the gains may be short-lived if policies only target norms at the household and individual levels. Rather, she argued that creating women’s networks, extending interventions beyond the household and encouraging collective action that challenges gender norms from the smallest to the largest scale can affect lasting change towards gender equality.
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Vidhu Mukundan is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Boston University.