{"id":820,"date":"2016-02-09T16:53:51","date_gmt":"2016-02-09T16:53:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/?p=820"},"modified":"2020-02-19T15:34:33","modified_gmt":"2020-02-19T15:34:33","slug":"early-marriage-social-networks-and-the-transmission-of-norms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/2016\/02\/09\/early-marriage-social-networks-and-the-transmission-of-norms\/","title":{"rendered":"Early marriage, social networks and the transmission of norms"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new discussion paper by\u00a0Niaz Asadullah and Zaki Wahhaj<\/span><\/a>, KDPE 1602<\/span><\/a>, February 2016<\/p>\n

Non-technical summary<\/strong><\/p>\n

A third of women in developing countries around the world marry before the age of 18, and\u00a0about one in nine before the age of 15. A large literature argues that early marriage disrupts\u00a0the accumulation of human capital among adolescent girls due to early school drop-out,\u00a0withdrawal from labour markets and adverse effects on health from early childbearing.<\/p>\n

International development agencies, national governments and NGO’s have made concerted\u00a0efforts in recent years to lower the incidence of early marriage through new legislation on\u00a0child marriage, improved enforcement of existing laws and interventions aimed at\u00a0adolescents.<\/p>\n

In this paper we investigate whether female early marriage is a conduit for the transmission\u00a0of social norms, specifically norms relating to gender roles and rights within the household\u00a0(henceforth called `gender norms’). Gender norms are believed to play an important role in\u00a0perpetuating gender inequalities in child survival, education, control over assets and\u00a0economic participation in a wide range of developing countries.<\/p>\n

The challenge for empirical research on the consequences of early marriage is that girls who\u00a0marry early tend to be poorer, have less educated parents, and to be born in rural areas; but\u00a0these background characteristics can have a direct effect on their opportunities and\u00a0subsequent life choices (such as schooling, fertility and employment). A recent set of studies\u00a0have used variation in the timing of menarche across women to estimate the impact of early\u00a0marriage on future outcomes.<\/p>\n

To investigate the effects of early marriage on gender norms, we introduce an innovation to\u00a0this approach by making use of a unique dataset with first-hand information on the age of\u00a0onset of menarche and marriage timing of sisters in rural Bangladesh. Specifically we use the\u00a0age of menarche as a source of exogenous variation in marriage timing between sisters. To\u00a0the extent that sisters are raised within the same household by the same parents, this allows us\u00a0to control for beliefs and attitudes that are transmitted from parents to children, and identify\u00a0the effects of the social consequences of reaching menarche and early marriage.\u00a0We provide evidence that early marriage affects a woman’s attitudes towards traditional\u00a0gender norms and the characteristics of her social network. In particular, early marriage\u00a0reduces the likelihood that a woman in her social network has made a non-traditional life\u00a0choice (completed secondary school, used contraception before the birth of her first child,\u00a0engaged in an income-generating activity) and increases her agreement with statements\u00a0supportive of gender bias in the allocation of resources and traditional gender roles.<\/p>\n

We find that the woman’s own schooling, her husband’s schooling, and her social network\u00a0account for, at most, one-third of the estimated effect of early marriage on gender norms.\u00a0Furthermore, using a sample of adolescents, we find no evidence that early onset of menarche\u00a0directly leads to increased agreement with traditional gender norms. Taken together, the\u00a0evidence suggests that the key pathway of norm transmission is early marriage itself or, more\u00a0specifically, the socialisation of young girls within the marital household.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new discussion paper by\u00a0Niaz Asadullah and Zaki Wahhaj, KDPE 1602, February 2016 Non-technical summary A third of women in developing countries around the world … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37654,"featured_media":1927,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[223908,70],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37654"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=820"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":821,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820\/revisions\/821"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}