NES Center for the Study of Diversity and Social Interactions and HSE International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development are happy to invite you to our joint meeting of the Research Seminar on Diversity and Development and HSE Seminar on Political Economy.

Speaker Vladimir Zabolotskiy (HSE) will present the paper "The Agricultural Origins of Gender Norms".

Abstract: 

This paper investigates the origins of cultural differences in gender norms. I test the hypothesis that transition towards agriculture contributed to the gender-based division of labor, consecutive exclusion of women from economic and political life, and gender inequality. I use sustainable genetic markers – Y-DNA haplogroups – associated with the spread of agriculture in Europe as a proxy for agricultural ancestral way of life. I find that regions, where the agricultural ancestry is more common than that of hunter- gatherers, have lower female labor force participation rates and higher gender inequality. Residents of these regions are also more likely to have gender-discriminatory attitudes towards females, and women living there are less likely to be employed. In contrast, regions, where the hunting-gathering ancestry prevails, have lower gender inequality and residents of these regions are less gender-biased. This opens up a field for discussion of how the issues of women’s agency should be addressed in regions with different agricultural past to achieve higher gender equality.

Registration: till noon of October 22.