Misperceived Social Norms: Women Working Outside the Home in Saudi Arabia
Leonardo Bursztyn, Alessandra L. González, David Yanagizawa-Drott
American Economic Review · 2020 · Volume 110 · Issue 10
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Search, Learning, Information and Knowledge, Communication, Belief, Unawareness, Economics of Gender, Non-labor Discrimination, Time Allocation and Labor Supply, Economic Development: Human Resources, Human Development, Income Distribution, Migration, Economic Sociology, Economic Anthropology, Language, Social and Economic Stratification
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