A chat with Paola Giuliano on the Origins of Gender Roles

Welcome to Girl Chat, a focus series where we interview economists and social scientists asking about their most recent research papers and publications. The aim of these podcasts is to share the invaluable work that economists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians do, making accessible to the general public and students, independently from their background and preparation. I'm your host, Marc College, PhD in Science in Economic and Monash University, and with me, directing the interview, is Sasha Baker, professor in economics and monitoring what we can do. Enjoy the interview! For the latest edition of Cross Chat, we are super happy to have Paula Trudiano from the University of California in Los Angeles, where she has professor of economics at the Anderson School of Management. Welcome Paula, good morning from Melbourne, good afternoon in LA. Hi, Sasha, thank you for having me. So we will be talking today about your paper on the origins of gender roles, women and a plough that some years ago came out in the quarterly journal of economics. And maybe you could start by telling us a bit about how you came up with the idea to look at that topic. Okay. So I think we started working on the paper a long time ago, so I think it was around 2006 or 2007, and so I was visiting Harvard, and probably was doing a coffee chat with Bertholiesin and Netanan, my co-authors, on the paper, in which we were trying to understand whether differences in the gender divisions of labor had an historical origin. So at the time, I was working with Alberto and Alessina on paper on family ties, and one of the characteristics of family ties was the gender divisions of labor. And so we were wondering, you know, is the division of labor, has the division of labor and historical origin, and then we knew about a book by Esther Bozer, so which is Women's Role in Economic Development, and essentially the idea of the paper came from that book. So let's me tell you if you want a little bit the main idea, which is very simple, and then, you know, how the project continued over time. So the book is fascinating, so it's, you know, I recommend it for people who didn't read it. And essentially what's the alter claims is that gender norms about the role of women in society originate in plain industrial societies, and the most important factor is the type of agriculture that the society used in the past. And so broadly speaking, she talked about two type of agriculture. One is a plow agriculture, and then the other one is shifting agriculture. In society that used the plow, a man had a physical advantage in using it. So men were working in the field, and women were staying at home, taking care of the kids and the animals at the time. And then in shifting agriculture, people were using instrument for which it wasn't required a particular physical strength, so like the digging stick. And so men and women were participating in agriculture equally. And so the story is that there was this initial distinction, and as a result of it, there were several gender norms that derived, such as, you know, the role of women is to stay at home, or even social norms like the dowry or the bride price. And she claimed in the book, although she doesn't prove it, that this norm persisted over time. And the only empirical evidence that you have in the book is someone that doted evidence of different agriculture, so this was the main idea. Okay, that was great. I have a quick question here. So you just gave a big background about like plug agriculture. What is the historical background there? Did you decide like pre-industrial period, and why did you focus just on that? So the difficult part was, so we wanted to study the origin, and then we wanted to see if there was a persistence in difference in gender norms over time. And so we knew that this difference existed in pre-industrial times from the anecdotal evidence that was reported in the book, but we were not sure that this difference in gender norms were still persisted until modern times. And this was the most difficult part of the paper. So you know, we started to work on the paper probably in 2006, and so I can give you a little bit of the ground on the data collections. The data collections took probably between four and five years. So the first things that we did, we, you know, she has essentially a few data points. So we thought, well, is it true that in pre-industrial society, there was this division of labor in agriculture between men and women? And there is a wonderful data set, but this is again only for pre-industrial society. And the data set has been collected by an anthropologist called Mardok, so it was collected around the '70s, and it has more than 1,000 ethnicities. So they represent all the world. And essentially we could see empirically whether it was true that in the pre-industrial societies for which we do have information, if there was this correlations between plough use and the gender divisions of labor. And so this was easy and probably took one afternoon because you can take the data out of the shelves and then do your empirical analysis. Then the difficult part is, well, how we link the past to the present, because, you know, we do have data on gender norms today. And then we did have the use of agriculture in pre-industrial societies, and the question is, how do we jump from, you know, the pre-industrial period to today? And so this is what it took a long period of time. And essentially what we did was the following. So first we did have a map of all the languages all over the world. And so, you know, you can have polygons of where the language is spoken in different parts of Africa. Then we linked the language to the ethnicities that was speaking the specific language. And then we attached to these ethnicities, whether the ethnicity was using the plough or not. And so for each country, we can calculate the share of ancestor that we're using the plough in the past. And of course, this requires a lot of time because you have to match first the languages to the ethnicities. Then you have to use census data for different countries. And then you have to create this summary measure of plough use and then link it to characteristics of two differences in gender role or differences in female labor force participation. So this is essentially what we did. So there was a little bit of anxiety when we did run our first regressions, but you know, it came out strong eventually, so we were all happy. So you already talked about data collection there. So you have on one hand the source Murdoch for the historic ethnicities, but then you use modern day data on one hand. You do cross country data, the world value survey. But then you also look within countries, the idea being that variation across countries could be driven by lots of things and by going more micro, going more regional, maybe you can even more easily nail down that things go back to the ancestors as opposed to some random cross country variation in the data, right? Yes. So we do a three type of exercise which is exactly right. So the first is the cross country correlation. So I'm broadly speaking, you see controlling for characteristics that we know that are related to female labor force participations, for example, the level of GDP of some measure of institutions. We do find that there is this strong correlations, but of course, the cross country correlations, you know, they can have a lot of omitted variables. And so the strongest part of the analysis, as you say, is the within country variation. So you take for example, an African countries. So Africa and certain part of Asia where the countries where there was more variations in terms of ethnicities and use of the plough. So for example, European countries, they don't have these within variations. But for many of the African and Asian countries, we can look within the country and even control for regional characteristics. So essentially what we compare are two ethnicities living in a very close geographical area for which we have a series of observable characteristics, such the level of education, the age and so on. And then we can see whether having ancestor who were using the plough in the past or not, had an impact on female labor force participations. And the last part of the analysis is something that many scholars have been studying cultural transmission use is to look at second generation immigrants. And so here, the idea is that even within the same countries, they can still be some omitted variables. So what you do, you take second generations immigrants, we look at the US mostly. So these immigrants are born and raised in the US. And so they speak English, typically as the first language, they are subject to the labor market institutions and all the institutions of the US. But their parents come from different country of origin. So yeah, but person was parents come from Turkey, another one was parents come from Italy. And then you look at the differences in whether the ancestor were using the plough or not. And whether there are differences in female labor force participations related to plough use. And we do find that this is the case. So now how you can imagine when you look at cross country correlations, the size of the effect is typically larger. And so when you look at within country variations, because you control for institutions for all the country characteristics, so the coefficient starts to become smaller. And then with immigrants, it eventually fades over time. So ideally, we would like to follow different generations of immigrants. But for data limitations, we can just track up to the second generations. But still, the result we're still there and we do find evidence of strong cultural persistence. So that's super fascinating that you can trace things that happened centuries ago in the behavior of people and societies today. And that you even find that in the US, we would say, okay, they went to the same school, they went to the same university. How on earth can they have different views about the world just because their ancestors had a certain type of agriculture? I always found this super fascinating. Great to see you summarize it, yeah, thank you. Thank you. And it feels like there's still more to come just following other generations that would be more research to come under these. Yes, this line of research is relatively new. So I think now there are several papers that have been documented the amount of persistence of cultural norms. So hopefully there would be more papers coming soon. It's a fascinating area of research, I think. Amazing. Now, something more personal, it sounds everything so exciting. What is the most exciting part of these line of research for you? And what do you find challenging? So probably the most fascinating part, at least for me, is the interdisciplinary nature. Of this type of research. So for the paper on gender law, we have to look at data from anthropology and use intuitions from anthropology, then a lot of the intuition comes from sociology. So it's a way of combining different disciplines. So maybe the hypothesis of Esther Bozer was bold. And so then the difficult part for an economist is to try to come up with an empirical strategy which is sound. So this is probably the most challenging part of this research agenda. So we span a very large period of time. And unfortunately we don't have data. So I cannot track societies from brain. And I don't have individual level data from what people were thinking in brain industrial times. So everything is, as we say, an economics very reduced form. And so the challenging part is try to understand the mechanism of why cultural transmissions can be so persistent. Causality is another big challenge in this line of research. Can I claim that the differences in agriculture cause differences in gender role? So the strength of the empirical analysis or coming up with an empirical strategy that is convincing is probably the most challenging part. Wonderful. Thank you. And maybe we can go back in time a bit in your own beta and your own life. So when did you decide to become an economist? Was that a dream of trial days and use days or was that an accident or how did it happen? I think it was probably an accident in the following sense. So when I was a child, I think I wanted to be an archaeologist, maybe because I grew up in Sicily. And so I was fascinated from all the different civilizations. So history was very present in my daily life. Then in high school, I think my strength was more in the quantitative part of the curriculum so mathematics. But the college system in it is very different for example in the US. So you don't have the liberal art college in which system in which you choose your field. So I wasn't sure. I think I was thinking more about becoming an engineer. And then by chance, at the end of high school, I think there was a program that brought several students from Italy to Bocconi, which is the university where I studied. And then I did discover that economics was a very interesting discipline. So in my mind, economics was like accounting and so very dry. But then when I went in this weekly visit, I discovered that there was a degree in which you were studying a lot of economic history, mathematics, law. You were studying also logic and epistemologies. I seemed very broad. And so I thought, you know, why not? It combines a lot of things. So I would give it, you know, I chose it. So it seems the right compromise for me at the time. And when I finished college, I knew that I didn't want to work in the private sector. And so then I applied for PhD and I did my PhD at Berkeley and Berkeley is a wonderful department for the topics I'm interested in. So I did study with George Arkeloff. And this is where my interest in social norm started essentially. And so I started to work on cultural norms from my PhD dissertations and then I continue after that. Wonderful. But yeah, here are contributions on gender issues, culture, institutions. I'm a big fan of your work and that's why it was a great pleasure to have you today. Thank you so much. So thanks for taking your time to summarize your paper for us and for our students and for the audience. And I hope you have a nice afternoon and greetings from Melbourne. Thank you. Thank you both. Thank you. Thank you. I'll see you in the next one. Thanks.