Job-creating economic growth as a structural driver of gender equality

Cultural Evolution / Human Development / Global Synthesis

The Great Gender Divergence

Why some societies have moved further toward gender equality than others

0+people Evans interviewed in 18 months of fieldwork on Zambia’s Copperbelt

Executive Summary

In Alice Evans’s account, the gap in gender equality between societies opened mainly in the twentieth century, with job-creating growth, democratization, secularization and feminist activism. Culture set the pace. Where family honor depended on keeping women at home, women took up new jobs more slowly. The same lever, such as new jobs for women, can therefore work quickly in one society and slowly in another.

Who's behind this

Alice Evans is a Visiting Associate Professor in Economics at Stanford University and a Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). She studies how social norms change, what drives support for gender equality, and workers’ rights in global supply chains. Her fieldwork includes Zambia’s Copperbelt and Cambodia. She writes the Substack The Great Gender Divergence.

Key terms

Growth is not the whole story

Oil did not cause patriarchy
Evans once endorsed, and now rejects, Michael Ross’s theory that oil booms cut demand for women’s labor in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Seclusion was tied to male honor long before oil, women’s labor-force participation has risen in oil-rich Qatar and Kuwait, and, she argues, seclusion became the norm in the region only after the Arab-Islamic conquests and the spread of Sharia law.
Culture shapes how women respond to new jobs
Culture, Evans argues, “mediates the rate at which women seize opportunities created by development and democratisation.” Her early account of Zambia’s Copperbelt, where hardship pushed women quickly into paid work, was by her own verdict “only half right,” because Zambians had little preference for seclusion to begin with. In much of South Asia and MENA, potential earnings are too low to make up for the loss of male honor.

Where the differences come from

In Evans’s account, all societies are gender unequal, some more than others. Conquest by patriarchal cultures, the inheritance and defense of land and herds, and religion led some societies to control women’s sexuality far more tightly, and geography limited how far these forces spread. These older differences later shaped how each society responded to growth.

1. Kinship and norms of seclusion

Medieval Europe was patriarchal, but its family structure later worked in women’s favor.

Nuclear families

Families in medieval England were already nuclear, a couple and their children, and northwestern Europeans married late, in their mid-twenties. Evans, once skeptical, now credits the Church’s campaign against cousin marriage, as Jack Goody, Joseph Henrich and Jonathan Schulz do. Married women kept working, an advantage once growth created jobs.

Patrilineal clans

In much of South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, clans traced descent through the male line and protected lineage and male honor by secluding daughters and wives. Evans calls this the patrilineal trap. No family wanted to break the norm alone, so women stayed close to home.

2. Jobs that draw women into paid work

Evans calls job-creating growth “a seriously under-rated engine of gender equality.”

East Asia’s factory boom

In China, South Korea and Taiwan, export-led industrialization created strong demand for young women’s labor. Industrialization was “necessary but not sufficient,” because women’s emancipation also required families already a little more willing to treat women as an economic resource.

Tipping the honor-income trade-off

Factory demand raised the cost of keeping daughters at home for every family in a village at once, so no family had to break the norm alone. “When all families wanted to do it, there could be no social condemnation.” Even so, industrialization “did not magically emancipate women.”

3. Cities, surveillance and safety

From fieldwork in Cambodia, Evans argues that cities increase the earnings a family forgoes when women stay out of paid work, show people more women in valued roles, and give women more ways to organize. Whether cities help also depends on whether the state keeps women safe.

Village surveillance

In a village, “everyone knows your name, your business, and your mother.” Cities offer anonymity, so families that prize seclusion may keep women out of city jobs while relying on their farm work. She cites Rajasthan, where female employment was high in villages but not in cities.

Safe streets

In Evans’s typology, some societies keep women at home. In others, women move freely, but men harass and assault them with impunity, so a woman “is either secluded or vulnerable.” Only in a third set do women escape family control and feel safe in the street. Where formal jobs are scarce and policing is weak, she suggests, rapid urbanization often brings crime.

4. Collective action and the despondency trap

Where people seldom see successful resistance, Evans argues, potential allies stay invisible and women comply with a status quo that seems unchangeable.

Networks beyond the family

Paid work in the public sphere lets women meet different people, encounter more egalitarian ideas, make friends and gain the confidence to resist unfairness. Evans has since said she over-rated female friendships.

Seeing reform succeed

Reformists who see advances at home and abroad may grow optimistic and escape the trap, as in her supply-chain study and in Latin American feminism, where reforms teach citizens that unfair laws can be overturned.

Co-education

Her 2014 qualitative research in Zambia’s Copperbelt suggests co-education may do more for gender equality than single-sex schooling, because seeing girls match boys in class can undermine stereotypes held by both.

Media and the spread of ideas

Evans argues that feminist activism can spread quickly in secular democracies, where “urbanisation and untrammelled media are like tinder to the flame.”

Television

In Latin America, Spain and the United States, television seems to have supported cultural liberalization and gender equality. The effect may depend on culture, including the absence of female seclusion and favorable views of the US.

How five regions diverged

The regions took different paths in Evans’s account.

Southeast Asia
For most of history, the matrilineal societies of Southeast Asia and southern Africa, which traced descent through women, were far less patriarchal than Europe. Women in the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos traded, owned land and divorced freely.
Europe
British industrialization brought the male breadwinner model and, after 1750, wider pay gaps. Women gained in the twentieth century, as firms short of qualified men hired them and contraception and household technology freed their time.
MENA and South Asia
Cousin marriage remains common in MENA and marriage within one’s caste in South Asia, and both regions retain norms of female seclusion.
East Asia
Factory jobs brought women into paid work, but political outcomes diverged. In Evans’s words, “Chinese women work but are still locked out of politics.” Taiwan adopted gender quotas after feminist lobbying, and women won 47 of its 113 legislative seats in 2024.
Latin America
Sustained mobilization has won gender quotas and reproductive rights and broken the silence around sexist violence. Women’s employment also rose over the three decades to 2023 despite weak growth, which Evans links partly to soaring house prices and to secularization.

How East Asia overtook South Asia

Around 1900, Evans wrote in 2021, women in East and South Asia were “equally oppressed and unfree,” and both regions were patrilineal and patrilocal, with brides joining their husbands’ families. East Asia then advanced far ahead, though she notes exceptions such as Bangladesh.

Row	East Asia	South Asia
Honor and income	Families seemed readier to treat women as an economic resource	Families seemed to weigh seclusion more heavily
Growth	Rapid industrialization drew women to factories and cities	Slower movement out of farming left fewer jobs for women
Outcome	Women earned money, supported their parents and gained independence	Women were better educated and had fewer children than before, but seldom worked outside the family

Jobs and feminist activism

Much remains unequal. As Evans puts it, “in every single country and company boardroom, men remain at the top.”

Three approaches to raising women’s employment

Evans proposed these in 2024 for places where female seclusion is idealized, with examples mainly from India.

1. Respected, well-paid jobs
If the only jobs open to women are low-paid and stigmatized, a husband may see his wife’s employment as a sign of his own failure. She sees India’s rise in women’s employment up to 2024, alongside rapid growth, as consistent with her model.
2. Media that shift perceived norms
Films, music and political messages that persuade men their neighbors respect working women. Bollywood films, for example, could normalize women’s employment.
3. Effective policing
Policing effective enough that families do not fear their daughters will be raped. Fear of violence tends to make families guard women more closely, as the activist Kavita Krishnan details.

Published by Center for Human Progress (US) Inc., a 501(c)(3) organization