Agricultural Ancestry and Gender Roles

Talk by Ekaterina Borisova (Lille) as part of the Research Seminar Series of the IOS Economics Department.

This study tests the hypothesis that transition towards sedentary farming and herding contributed to the emergence of gender roles regarding female labor force participation. We propose that transition to agriculture per se lead further to pronounced differences in gender norms and contributed to gender inequality. We use a novel dataset of sustainable genetic markers – Y-DNA haplogroups associated with the spread of agriculture – to trace cultural origins of gender norm differences. We find that locations where agricultural ancestry is more widespread have lower female labor force participation rates. Their residents are also more likely to have gender-discriminatory attitudes towards females. The reverse is true in locations where hunting-gathering ancestry prevails. Results are valid at the country level, the individual level, and for the subsamples of second generation migrants. They stay robust to using several data sets of genetic markers and a rich set of control variables. Moreover, our estimates show that our agricultural ancestry measure outperforms the other measures like grammatical gender intensity or plough use. Our results help to explain why differences in gender roles are persistent and contribute to the debate on gender roles and agricultural ancestry.