On the Origins of Gender Roles:

Women and the Plough

Overview
This paper seeks to establish a negative relationship between historic plough use and contemporary female roles. Based on Boserup (1970) Tests for transmission of cultural norms and beliefs across generations

Bosureps Argument
Two types of cultivation
Shifting; labour intensive, makes use of digging sticks, does not require much effort Plough; capital intensive, requires much physical effort

With plough cultivation men had an advantage, this developed specialization across gender lines
Men worked on the fields Women specialized in domestic activities

This led to beliefs about the roles of women in society which has been passed across generations.

Did plough cultivation lead to gender specialization?

The paper rests on the proposition that plough cultivation led to specialization across gender lines. Empirical evidence shows that this was the case.
Negative relationship between plough use and participation of women in agricultural activities

Methodology
Alesina et al. construct district level and country level measures of historic plough use combining ethnographic information. Using those measures, we test Boserups claim. We use the following DGP:

OLS Estimates
Plough: measure of ancient plough use is a vector of contemporary controls such as level of GDP. This recognises the fact that female participation can be influenced by the level of development of the country. is a vector of historic controls such as presence of tropical climate. is a measure of female involvement

OLS Results
We find that plough use is negatively correlated with
female labour participation female entreneurship female in politics

This correlation is statistically significant even after allowing for additional controls such as absence of private property and major religion.

Problems with OLS

Consistent with other interpretations. It may be that societies with attitudes towards gender inequality were more likely to adopt plough cultivation. OLS suffers from endogeneity bias. OLS will be positively biased. Need to instrument historical plough use

IV estimates
Panel A. Second stage. Dependent variable: Females in Politics Female labour force Share of firms with participation some female ownership Historical plough use Historical controls Contemporary controls Continent FEs Observations R-squared -25.853** (10.051) -26.423** (12.465) 157 0.43 -19.939* (11.932) -26.274* (14.439) 104 0.13 -16.820* (9.243) -23.089*** (12.331) 124 0.05

157 0.39

104 0.01

124 0.17

Plough-positive environment Plough-negative environment Equality of coefficients F-stat (excluded instruments) Hausman test (p-value)

Panel B. First stage. Dependent variable: historical plough use 0.412*** 0.377*** 0.656*** 0.561*** 0.401*** 0.340*** (0.119) (0.101) (0.150) (0.143) (0.140) (0.117) -0.120 -0.079 -0.017 0.001 -0.032 -0.026 (0.091) (0.075) (0.101) (0.075) (0.103) (0.087) 0 0 0 0 0 0 10.76 7.9 11.68 7.71 5.63 4.54

0.15

0.19

0.44

0.29

0.18

0.09

IV Results
We find a significant and negative correlation between historical plough use and
Female participation in the labour force Female entrepreneurship Female in politics

Results consistent with OLS being positively biased.

Note on the Hausman test results

The null of the Hausman test is that the OLS estimates are as good as the IV estimates. Test of the validity of IV. We find that we fail to reject the null at standard levels of significance. We should use OLS instead as IV is inefficient.

Thank You!