Misperceived Social Norms: Women Working Outside the Home in Saudi Arabia2020

This paper is about the discrepancy in what married Saudi men (aged 18 to 35) privately believe, and what they think societal values are; concerning the question of women working outside of home (WWOH). While most of them support it, they overestimate the amount of other men who are opposed to this position. By way of an anonymous survey conducted in neighborhood sessions, the authors show that out of 500 of these men, 87% agreed with a statement saying WWOH should be allowed, but that 72% underestimate the support of other men within their own session. When plotting this wedge  (guess - real value) as a histogram, we see that it is concentrated somewhat uniformly in the negative side. It even looks like almost half of the men underestimate it by 20 to 100 points. The average wedge is -24 points.

The intervention tests an informational channel by randomly showing men what the true share was. The men were then offered to choose between a $5 gift card and signing up their wife for a job-matching service. The control group chose the service 23.48% of the time. The treatment raised the probability that the husbands signed up their wife by 8.53 percentage points (Table 2 column 1), meaning that the treatment group chose the service 32.02% of the time. This effect is larger (although the difference between groups is not significant) for those who had a negative wedge (Table 4). The long term effects are also very interesting. After a few months, treatment raised the probability that the wife applied for an outside job by 10.4 percentage points (Table 3 column Applied) and that they interviewed by 4.7 percentage points (same table next column). There is no significant effect on employment. It looks to me that 65% of women are already employed and this is merely a matter of where they work, not if they work.

I like that the paper is humble and refrains from making an assertion as to why society is in a misperceptions equilibrium (as they call it), but they speculate that there is a lack of communication between society and individuals, and that the mechanism may be particularly relevant if mass media does not appropriately convey to the public what values dominate in society. I would not be so sure. Before the survey, there was no majority for the media to convey. There were men who said yes when asked and who otherwise kept quiet about the subject. The majority that supports women working outside the home comes into being when someone asks the question and counts the answers. It gives people a new picture of society through its representation as a statistic, as opposed to how the symbolic order previously existed for the individual subject. It appears then that Saudi men, and I would imagine men in general, obey this big Other that very few people actually embody. One implication is that the publicness of the signal is economically relevant? But the direction of the effect is unclear to me. This relates to the first point, a rival representation, such as traditionalist propaganda saying the poll is fake or foreign-funded, would then become another sign competing for the same role.

In table 6 we see another wave of results. With a recruitment experiment, in which women who wanted to do survey enumerator work from home are given the option between making the survey from home or in person. The survey is the same but the pay is better for the outside version. Hearing the 82% statistic increased the probability of choosing the outside job by 15.3 percentage points (from 18.1% to 33.3%). Actual attendance also rises after hearing the statistic. This is the only direct labor supply measure in the paper's experiments, since from what I understand most of this comes from what the husband is reporting.

Overall I quite liked the paper, I think it is the first paper from the 2020s that I have seen in a top 5 journal that does not contain a single equation. It maybe would be nice to not rely on what husbands report. Another interesting consideration is that this type of research makes me hungry to understand and study the social norm itself. Why is it that this happens, beyond a materialist analysis of history and so on (which seems true), what is the mechanism of dominion in the patriarchal arrangement that makes it so that women's labor, paid or unpaid, becomes invisible?