Misperceived Social Norms: Women Working Outside the Home in Saudi Arabia

By Leonardo Bursztyn, Alessandra L. González, David Yanagizawa-Drott. The American Economic Review, 2020

408 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that the vast majority of young married men in Saudi Arabia privately support women working outside the home (WWOH) and substantially underestimate support by other similar men. Correcting these beliefs increases men’s (costly) willingness to help their wives search for jobs. Months later, wives of men whose beliefs were corrected are more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job outside the home. In a recruitment experiment with a local company, randomly informing women about actual support for WWOH leads them to switch from an at-home temporary enumerator job to a higher-paying, outside-the-home version of the job. (JEL D83, J16, J22, O15, Z13)

Subfields: Gender Studies, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/89975023146ad1a29ff4af441df8c431f4a46406

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Citations in the corpus

Misperceptions About Others (2021, background): “…to stigma and social desirability biases that may affect survey responses and find that this is not a primary concern (e.g., Cantoni et al. 2019, Bursztyn et al. 2020c); however, others have found it to be relevant for particular contexts, such as social distancing behaviors during the COVID-19…”
Social Norms as a Barrier to Women’s Employment in Developing Countries (2020, background): “Bursztyn et al. (2020) show compelling evidence of the importance of norms in Saudi Arabia.”
Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, methodology): “…to study job search (Abebe et al., 2020; Altmann et al., 2018; Belot et al., 2018, 2019; Carranza et al., 2020; Franklin, 2017), social norms (Bursztyn et al., 2020b), educational aspirations (Lergetporer et al., 2018b), schooling decisions (Jensen, 2010), major choice (Bleemer and Zafar,…”
Reshaping Adolescents' Gender Attitudes: Evidence from a School-Based Experiment in India (2018, result): “Our study is also related to Cantoni et al. (2017), which finds that Chinese students taught with textbooks designed to convey pro-Communist messages express more pro-government views and skepticism of free markets as adults.”
From Extreme to Mainstream: The Erosion of Social Norms (2020, background): “Bursztyn, González, and Yanagizawa-Drott (2020) directly manipulate perceived social norms, which in turn changes behavior.”