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祉。它有两个分支，涉及两个地理区域的研究，孟加拉国农村和印度农村低收入地区。第一个分支是使用次要数据来研究态度的变化和妇女在过去20年中的劳动力参与情况。这部分工作有四个国家(英国、德国、印度和孟加拉国)的高素质专家研究人员共同努力，将最新发现的统计分析方法应用于二次调查数据和新的主要调查数据集。调查专家将对印度的600户家庭和孟加拉国的600户家庭的初步调查的管理提出建议。我们收集了农村地区的数据，在那里可以探索劳动力供应的两个谜团--1)主要在印度，是什么原因导致如此多的女性在2000-2007年的繁荣时期明显地从劳动力市场撤出劳动力，以及在直到2013年的后来几年里发生了什么？2)在印度和孟加拉国，在与劳动力供应相关的方式上，是什么态度区分了妇女(和男子)，导致一些家庭避免向市场提供妇女的有偿劳动，而获得了从事其他形式的无偿、非正式和家务工作的机会？我们只包括贫困农村地区。主要调查数据包括家庭、个人和村庄数据收集工具，并在一年内有两个时间点的数据，允许在一个小的季节性面板上检查男性和女性的工资差异。我们可以从这些数据中创建劳动力供应的模型。结果将比标准结果更好。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(每个国家80个，作为对选定个案的调查的后续行动，在印度和孟加拉国分别进行60名男子和20名妇女以及同样的调查)，考察妇女劳动和妇女角色变化的根源和阻力。我们调查了每个领域对妇女工作及其非正式/正式劳动力供应的态度。一些关于家务角色的态度限制了一些女性外出工作的意愿，并对在经济增长的潜在现代化影响期间采取更平等主义态度的普遍趋势提供了阻力。我们将报告查尔坎德邦、比哈尔邦和北方邦(印度)以及孟加拉国两个农村地区这些态度的实际多样性。我们的主要利益相关者在第一年的会议上分析了关于态度的试点数据。定性研究抵消了经济学中的一个传统，即在研究妇女的劳动力供应时，纯粹关注狭义的有偿劳动，并使用个人主义的方法。我们避免个人主义，但我们将定量数据和定性数据结合在一起。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，它着眼于夫妻两人。另一个强大的优势是我们使用多水平模型，以及我们在调查数据面板(两个季节)中控制随时间变化的能力。我们预计，调查结果将对2007年前发生的临时和非正式部门农村劳动力的女性化现象有深刻的认识。我们对这一变化的解释将非常复杂。我们将考虑经济学家所说的效率损失，家庭如何实现“区别”、尊严和幸福，以及女权主义对妇女工作的方法，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和高度原创性。该团队在这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.