The evidence in table 6 that mother’s bargaining power influences the amount of house-work that daughters take over when mothers get employed suggests that mothers have influence over daughters’ time. But should daughters themselves and fathers also be seen as decision makers participating in decisions about daughters’ time use? In table 7, I interact proxies for the mother’s, father’s and the oldest daughter’s preferences – answers to survey questions about each of the three family-members’ attitude towards girls’ schooling – with the treatment. In households in which the mother considers girls’ schooling more important, the negative effect of mother’s employment on daughters’ schooling is significantly smaller. The father’s attitude towards girls schooling appears to have less influence on time use substitution between mothers and daughters, and a daughter’s own preferences have no significant effect on the amount of house-work she is expected to take over when her mother gets employed. It thus appears that daughters in rural Ethiopia have little control over their own time use in times of need.Analysis of how households select into mother’s versus father’s employment is important in its own right but also represents a powerful auxiliary test of the main message of the framework above. If, as this paper has argued, a key determinant of rural Ethiopians’ time use is gender-specific, greenhouse benches intra-household labor substitution, greenhouse benches then household characteristics that influence the impact of mother’s and father’s employment on other family-members – such as the gender composition of a couple’s children – should also influence selection into mother’s versus father’s employment.
The sample analyzed consists of households in which either the mother or the father applied to a flower farm. To pool the two sub-samples and explore selection into the two groups, we must thus assume that, in for example a household in which the mother applied, the father would have applied had the mother not done so. While this assumption is ultimately untestable, it is arguably reasonable. As noted, there were only seven households in which both spouses applied – for most households the relevant choice options appear to have been for one or none of the two spouses to apply. There are few households in the sample in which the spouse of the applicant was already formally employed. In table 8 I investigate the comparability of the two sub-samples. Excluding the right-hand-side variables that the framework predicts should influence selection into the two groups , the only significant difference is that husbands are one year older in households in which the mother applied. I thus control for husband’s age in the analysis below. As we saw in table 6, perhaps the most important variable governing heterogeneity in the impact of mother’s employment on daughters’ time-use is the gender composition of the couple’s children because the presence of more daughters means that house-work can be shared between more hands. As such, we would expect the number of daughters to have an important influence on selection into mother’s versus father’s employment. But testing for a causal relationship is possible only if the number of daughters is exogenous conditional on the total number of children. If parents follow differential stopping rules – that is, if the probability of having another child depends on the gender composition of existing children – then the number of daughters is not exogenous even conditional on family size, as pointed out by Clark and discussed in detail in Washington .
It turns out that parents in the sample do not follow such stopping rules: neither a variable equal to the total number of children, nor dummies for having a given number of children, predict the proportion of daughters, as seen in table 9. The explanation may be that desired family sizes in rural Ethiopia are so large that almost all couples have one or more sons through “natural” fertility behavior. Parents with son preference typically want “at least X number of sons” , where X is a positive but relatively low number.We can thus test if the gender composition of a couple’s children has a causal effect on the probability that a mother seeks employment. I do so in table 10, including interactions with the proxies for mother’s weight on daughters’ well-being and mother’s bargaining power to mirror the heterogeneity regressions in table 6. The selection analysis results are supportive of the idea that female time use substitution is key to household employment and schooling decisions in Ethiopia. For example, one additional daughter increases the probability that the mother applies by 8 percentage points, or 12 percent, controlling for the total number of children, in households with low weight on daughter well-being and low mother’s bargaining power. The results also indicate that the higher the weight on daughters’ well-being, the lower the influence of the number of daughters on the couple’s employment decision. The reason appears to be that highly valued daughters are expected to take over less household work when mothers get employed. Finally, mother’s bargaining power at baseline has a marginally significant positive effect on the influence of the number of daughters on the probability that the mother applies. The presence of daughters has a direct influence on the mother’s well-being under mother’s employment relative to father’s employment because a mother can likely decrease her time spent on house-work when employed more when more daughters are present. A father’s well-being under mother’s versus father’s employment may, in contrast, be less dependant on the gender composition of the couple’s children because “male” house-work is less time consuming.
It appears that greater bargaining power for the mother therefore increases the weight given to the gender composition of the couple’s children when the employment decision is made. The findings in table 10 thus suggest that parents take into account substitutability between a mother’s and daughters’ time use when making adult employment decisions. If daughters taking over house-work duties when mothers get employed is difficult to avoid, it may be that the best way to take daughters’ well-being into account is at the employment decision stage.Domestic violence represents a serious violation of women’s rights and imposes substantial costs on society. In parts of Ethiopia, 71 percent of ever-partnered women have been physically assaulted by a male partner . In the U.S., domestic violence assault is more common than all other forms of violence combined . But despite its prevalence throughout much of the world, the nature of physical abuse of women remains poorly understood. Little is therefore known about how to address the issue. In this paper, growers equipment we analyze the effect of female employment on domestic violence through a field experiment in rural Ethiopia that randomized job offers, the first of its kind. Conventional economic models of domestic violence are “optimistic” in the sense of predicting a decrease in abuse when women get employed; we find the opposite. We then begin to distinguish between “pessimistic” models. We find limited support for models in which violence is used as a tool to gain control over household resources, growers equipment and more support for models that allow men to see violence as a way to restore their dominance in the household. The sample consists of 329 households in which an adult woman applied to a flower farm job and was deemed acceptable for hiring by the farm. The treatment and control groups were re-surveyed 5 – 7 months after employment commenced. Our research design has important advantages. Because we directly vary job offers, we can attribute changes in violence to the causal effect of employment. There is to our knowledge no existing experimental evidence from poor countries on the effects of permanent female employment, by many thought to be the most effective way to reduce physical abuse. Policy and arguments are therefore made on the basis of assumptions on which clear-cut causal evidence is largely missing: the World Health Organization argues, for example, that “women’s access to. . . employment should. . . be strongly supported as part of overall anti-violence efforts” . In the absence of sufficient evidence, there is little consensus on which model of domestic violence best describes reality. In the main result of the paper, we find a 13 percent increase in the probability that a woman is experiencing physical domestic violence, when she gets employed. We also find a 34 percent increase in emotional abuse, and a 32 percent increase in the number of violent incidents per month. As discussed below, the effects are unlikely to represent a change in reporting behavior. Our results are hard to reconcile with conventional models, most of which are optimistic in the sense that employment and other forms of economic empowerment of women is predicted to decrease abuse. We thus explore the ability of more recent, pessimistic violence models to explain our findings. Authors of instrumental violence models argue that a husband may turn more violent when his wife’s income goes up in order to counteract a rise in her bargaining power, or to increase the husband’s slice of a bigger income pie. But there is no indication that violent husbands in our sample have greater control over household resources, neither before nor after female employment.
Alternatively, physical abuse may be seen as a way to restore a traditional order in the household; either used by husbands to influence wives’ behavior, or generating direct, expressive utility for husbands. We argue that a natural adjustment to existing expressive violence models would allow the marginal utility that a husband derives from violence to increase when he is “disempowered” by his wife’s employment. Consistent with this, the increase in the incidence of violence is greater in households in which the newly employed wife was likely to end up further ahead of her husband in income because her baseline income was comparatively high relative to her husband’s. This paper’s findings have significant implications for theory and policy. We document that the form of female empowerment most forcefully advocated in the effort to reduce abuse of women – employment – increases rather than decreases domestic violence in the context of rural Ethiopia, and that the reason appears to be that men act upon the emotional costs implied by deviations from traditional household roles. We do not attempt to survey the literature on domestic violence here, but briefly summarize some of the most relevant papers. There are two cross-cutting dichotomies of domestic violence models: optimistic versus pessimistic models, and instrumental models in which violence is used to gain control over household resources versus models in which violence is not used to gain control over resources. Examples of conventional optimistic models include Chwe and Aizer . In Chwe , a male principal can use financial disincentives to discourage low effort from a high income female agent but must instead use costly violence disincentives to motivate a low income female. In Aizer , improvements in a woman’s expected utility outside of marriage, for example due to employment, is expected to reduce the level of violence she is willing to “offer” a husband who derives utility from violence. Aizer finds that decreases in the male-female wage gap in the U.S. reduce violence against women. There are several potential reasons why Aizer’s findings differ from ours. One possibility is that, in more male-dominated cultures such as that of many developing countries, the marginal utility men derive from violence may increase as women’s standing improves. Though not all the findings of previous studies can necessarily be interpreted causally, our results add to increasing evidence that nominal empowerment of women in poor countries can increase domestic violence. Eswaran and Malhotra find that women in India who work outside of the home are subjected to more violence. Gonzalez-Bernes concludes that female labor force participation in Zambia, Rwanda and Tanzania is not associated with lower levels of violence. The evidence for middle income countries is mixed at best. Instrumental models typically argue that men use violence as a tool to gain control over household resources, rather than as an end in itself. Examples of pessimistic instrumental violence models include Bloch and Rao and Bobonis et al. . Alternatively, men may derive “expressive” utility directly from violence, in which case physical abuse can be triggered by events that have purely symbolic meaning . This paper’s findings are most supportive of the expressive “male backlash” theories emphasized by sociologists .