Conference Agenda

For decades, researchers and policymakers have promoted non-transferable parental leave for fathers as a means to mitigate persistent gendered inequalities in the division of paid and unpaid labour. However, the causal effect of such policies remains a matter of debate. In this paper we argue that this question and the methods used to answer it, are poorly aligned with dynamic conceptual frameworks of gender as a social structure. To illustrate our arguments, we consider a unique case which might pique the interests of scholars interested in isolating the causal effects of leave policy. In 2011, Slovakia introduced a generous leave policy for fathers, granting them six months of well-remunerated leave benefits not transferable to mothers. Unlike in most other countries, the Slovakian policy was introduced without much discussion or public awareness, and it is unlikely that the policy was a response to public demand. It is also unlikely that parents strategically adjusted their birth timing to make use of the new benefits. Drawing on a long tradition of micro-economic policy analysis, we might attempt to exploit the apparent exogeneity of the policy as a way of assessing the causal effect of this “best practice” policy. Treating the new policy as critical juncture (Neyer and Andersson 2008), we’d compare fathers’ leave-taking just before and after the policy was introduced and interpret the relatively limited change as the causal effect of the policy. We might suggest that larger changes have been observed elsewhere due to anticipatory behaviour or reverse causality. The real causal effects, we might suggest, are far more modest. Instead, we argue that gender theory problematises this kind of approach. The experimental logic assumes that responses to change are quick and stable. In contrast, theories of gender as a structure depict policy as the beginning of a trajectory of change and draw attention to contextual moderating effects – the support factors (Hardie and Cartwright 2012) that determine whether a policy will operate similarly in two different contexts. This literature suggests that an evaluation of change over time – and one that is attentive to the particularities of the social context – is necessary if we are going to understand policy effects and – the effect they might have elsewhere. Rather than trying to mimic the experimental method in the natural sciences, an approach which takes a longer view and situates quantitative evidence will provide more relevant contributions to knowledge.

In this article, we consider what a history of economic theories and debates on reproduction in the early twenty-century can contribute to our understanding of the contemporary struggle for global reproductive justice. Recent studies of employment, wages, human capital investment, and economic development emphasize family size as an important choice variable, yet often without more than passing reference to the work of earlier economists. Indeed, historical analysis of economic thought on reproduction, contraception, and abortion tends to be sporadic and rarely systematic. For example, Becchio’s (2020) history of feminist economics mentions neither contraception nor abortion. The same is true for Madden (1972), Dimand and Madden (2019), and Kuiper (2022). There are no synthetic studies of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century economists on reproductive rights and justice, though some individual profiles and comparative studies exist (e.g., Boianovsky 2001; Lundahl 2005 and 2015, and recently Bankovsky, Johnson and Gomez Betancourt 2023).

Historical attention to these early debates about family size demonstrates, in first place, the precarious nature of reproductive rights and, in second place, how choice in childbearing was rarely viewed through the lens of reproductive justice. Instead, economic theory generally left women on the outside of the discussion. Women’s reproductive choice was defended not because of any concern for women’s bodily autonomy but rather because of a national or social interest in the effects on poverty and living standards of individual reproductive choices. This paper focuses on two main questions in the context of the Eugenic U.S. Progressive era (1890-1920). First, what did Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Irving Fisher think about the role of contraception and abortion in family limitation? Second, what differences did they establish explicitly or implicitly in contraception and abortion of unwanted children by the working classes, immigrants, and black people? Opposite to Fisher, Gilman might have been exceptional in defending reproductive rights for women (giving them scientific sex education and improving their standards of living). Still, she was not exceptional with respect to eugenic arguments. The American eugenics movement lobbied fiercely in favor of forced sterilization measures for entire population categories. Fisher's repeated theoretical link between the "value of the human capital" of a nation and its wealth leads not only to "breed out the unfit and breed in the fit" but also to protect the existing elite.

In this paper, we exploit the massive amount of information from Facebook to build a measure of gender attitudes in Italy at previously impossible resolution—the municipal level. We construct our index via a machine learning method to replicate a benchmark region-level measure. Interestingly, we find that most of the variation in our Gender Norms Index (GNI) is across towns within narrowly defined geographical areas, rather than across regions or provinces. In a second step, we show how this local variation in norms can be leveraged for identification purposes. In particular, we use our index to investigate whether these differences in norms carry over to the policy activity of politicians elected in the Italian Parliament. We document that females are more likely to sit in parliamentary committees focused on gender-sensitive matters, labor and social issues, but not if they come from a relatively conservative town. These effects are robust to conditioning on the legislative term and electoral district, suggesting the importance of social norms in shaping legislators' policy activity.

A part of the investigation of electoral results in political economy affirms that physical appearance influences the evaluation that voters make, and therefore, can influence their votes, but that this evaluation is not the same for male candidates as for women. This paper analyzes the influence of dominance, beauty, and the emotions reflected by candidates on the behavior of voters in municipal elections in Colombia from a gender perspective. Taking 3 elections and information from almost 14,000 candidates, I find that: having a dominant face increases the percentage of votes for male candidates more than for women, while beauty influences more the votes they receive in female candidates, and that showing happiness is important for both genders, while showing disgust is only significant for men. The results suggest that physical appearance does matter in politics.