Gender Norms, Labour Supply and Poverty Reduction in Comparative Context: Evidence from Rural India and Bangladesh

该项目的重点是与妇女的态度和工作有关的妇女福利。它有两个分支机构，涉及两个地理区域的研究，即孟加拉国农村和印度农村低收入地区。第一个分支是利用二手数据来研究二十年来态度的变化和妇女劳动力的参与情况。这部分工作由四个国家（英国、德国、印度和孟加拉国）的高素质专业研究人员共同努力，将最新发现的统计分析方法应用于二次调查数据和新的一次调查数据集。调查专家将为印度600户和孟加拉国600户的初步调查的管理提供咨询意见。我们在农村地区收集数据，可以探索劳动力供应的两个谜团- 1）主要是在印度，是什么导致如此多的妇女在2000-2007年的繁荣期间从劳动力市场撤出劳动力，以及在2013年之前的几年里发生了什么？（2）在印度和孟加拉国，妇女（和男子）在劳动力供应方面的区别是什么态度，导致一些家庭避免向市场提供有报酬的妇女劳动，而让她们从事其他形式的无报酬、非正式和家务工作？我们只包括贫穷的农村地区，初步调查数据包括家庭、个人和村庄数据收集工具，并在一年内的两个时间点收集数据，从而可以在一个小的季节性小组中审查男女工资差异。我们可以从这些数据中创建劳动力供应模型。第二个分支涉及对性别和工作态度的混合方法分析。在这里，研究还根据态度数据和半结构化访谈，进一步审查妇女劳动和妇女角色变化的来源和阻力（每个国家80个，作为选定个案调查的后续行动，我们研究了对妇女工作的态度及其在每个领域的非正式/正式劳动力供应。对家庭角色的一些态度限制了一些妇女外出工作的意愿，并在经济增长的潜在现代化影响中抵制了更平等态度的总体趋势。我们将报告这些态度在贾坎德、比哈尔邦和北方邦（印度）以及孟加拉国两个农村地区的实际多样性。我们在第一年举行的主要利益攸关方会议分析了关于态度的试点数据，定性研究抵消了经济学在研究妇女劳动力供应时纯粹关注狭义有偿劳动和使用个人主义方法的传统。我们避免个人主义，但我们结合了定量和定性数据。这项研究将人口学与社会学和经济学结合起来。我们有一种新的建模方法，着眼于夫妻对。另一个强大的优势是我们使用多层次模型，以及我们控制调查数据面板（两个季节）随时间变化的能力。我们希望研究结果能对2007年之前农村临时和非正规部门劳动力的女性化问题提供深刻的见解。我们对这种变化的解释将是非常复杂的。我们将考虑经济学家所谓的效率损失，家庭如何实现“区别”和尊严以及福祉，以及女权主义者对妇女工作的方法作为替代解释框架。因此，该项目鼓励对新数据进行科学探索，同时也有助于揭示不同的扶贫干预措施如何与现有的性别角色和规范相互作用。这项研究具有很强的跨学科性和原创性。该团队在此类研究方面有着良好的记录。

The project focuses on women's well-being as related to their attitudes and their work. It has two branches and involves research in two geographic areas, rural Bangladesh and rural low-income parts of India. The first branch is to use secondary data to look at changing attitudes and women's labour-force involvement over two decades. This part of the work has highly qualified specialist researchers in four countries (UK, Germany, India, and Bangladesh) working together to apply the most recently discovered methods of statistical analysis to both secondary survey data and a new primary survey data set. The survey experts will advise on the administration of the primary survey with 600 households in India and 600 households in Bangladesh. We gather data in rural areas where two mysteries of labour supply can be explored -- 1) mainly in India, what caused so many women to apparently withdraw their labour from the labour market during the boom of 2000-2007, and what happened during the later years up to 2013?; and 2) in both India and Bangladesh, what attitudes differentiate women (and men) in ways relevant to labour supply, causing some households to avoid offering paid wage labour of women to the market, while gaining their availability for other forms of unpaid, informal and domestic work? We include only poor rural areas.The primary survey data includes household, personal and village data-collection instruments, and has data at two points in time within one year, allow male-female wage differentials to be examined over a small seasonal panel. We can create models of the supply of labour from these data. The results will be better than standard results.The second branch involves mixed methods analysis of attitudes about gender and work. Here, the research also moves on to examine the sources of change and resistance to change in women's labour and women's roles, based upon the attitudinal data and semi-structured interviews (80 per country, carried out as followups to the survey for selected individual cases, 60 men and 20 women in India and the same in Bangladesh).We examine attitudes about women's work and their informal/formal labour supply in each area. Some attitudes about domestic roles to limit the willingness of some women to labour outside their home, and offer resistance to the general trend toward more egalitarian attitudes during the potentially modernising influence of economic growth. We will report on the actual diversity of these attitudes in the states of Jharkand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (India) and two rural areas of Bangladesh. Our Key Stakeholders Meetings in Year 1 analyse the pilot data on attitudes.The qualitative research offsets a tradition in economics of focusing purely on narrowly defined paid labour, and using individualistic approaches, when studying labour-supply of women. We avoid individualism and yet we combined quantitative and qualitative data. This research integrates demography with sociology and economics. We have a new modelling method that looks at the husband-wife pair. Another strong advantage is our use of multilevel models and our ability to control for change over time in the panel of survey data (for two seasons). We expect the results to give profound insights into the feminisation of the casual and informal-sector rural labour force that occured prior to 2007. Our interpretation of this change will be very sophisticated. We will consider what economists call efficiency losses, how families achieve 'distinction' and dignity as well as well-being, and feminist approaches to women's work as alternative interpretive frameworks. The project thus encourages a scientific exploration of new data while also being of service in exposing how different poverty alleviation interventions interacted with existing gender roles and norms. The study is strongly interdisciplinary and highly original. The team has a strong track record of such research.