Diana Contreras Suárez, Melbourne Institute - Swaying Gender Norms Around Women’s Work in Indonesia: Evidence from an Online intervention

Title: Swaying Gender Norms Around Women’s Work in Indonesia: Evidence from an Online intervention

Abstract: How to influence social norms that drive behaviours in relation to women participation in employment is still not very well understood. In this paper we first describe what are the social norms in relation to married women with children participating in the labour market in Indonesia. We find that men and women underestimate by at least 10 percentage points how much women are supportive of working women. They substantially underestimate the high level of support amongst their peers for shared day-to-day childcare with husbands. In terms of the reference groups that are important, they are particularly concern that mothers and mothers in law are not supportive of women working outside the home. In the second part of the paper, we experimentally test if providing information to individuals on i) women’s  level of support towards women with children working outside home (T1), ii) husband’s support for sharing day-to-day childcare with wives (T2) and iii) mothers’ generation support towards women working (T3), changes men and women’s willingness to support women’s employment outside of home. We find that providing this information to men increases their probability of choosing a career mentoring course for their wives by 19%. For men with non-working wives providing (T2) information on sharing childcare activities increases the probability of choosing the career mentoring course by at least 31%. Finally, we find that misconceptions on social norms do not seem to affect the effect of the treatment.

Presenter: ‪Diana Contreras Suárez, Melbourne Institute

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