Culture, Kinship and Women’s Labour Opportunities: Evidence from Malawi and Indonesia*
利用马拉维和印度尼西亚的家庭调查数据，结合民族志资料，研究了从夫居习俗对女性就业数量和质量的长期影响，发现该习俗显著提升女性工资就业和正式合同概率，但降低总体就业率，机制涉及家庭议价能力和暴力容忍度。
Economic and anthropological research has shown that gender roles often originate from ancestral divisions of labor in subsistence activities. This paper examines the impact of ancestral matrilocality on women’s employment status in Malawi and Indonesia, focusing on both employment quantity and quality. Using individual-level data from the Malawi Integrated Household Survey and the Indonesia Family Life Survey, combined with ethnic-level cultural data from Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas, we assess how matrilocality—where husbands relocate to their wives’ families after marriage—affects women’s likelihood of overall employment, wage employment and holding a formal job contract. We find that matrilocality significantly increases women’s likelihood of wage employment, enhances the probability of formal contract work, and reduces overall employment. Mechanisms driving these effects include strengthened household bargaining power and reduced tolerance for gender-based violence among matrilocal women. These results highlight the persistence of ancestral norms in shaping gendered labor market outcomes and support culturally sensitive policy interventions to reduce gender disparities.