Inequitable Gender Norms

Inequitable gender norms are anchored in all aspects of human life. Traditional views that consider the man as primary breadwinner and the women as homemaker continue to dominate in many regions all around the world. Indeed, the persistence of patriarchal norms have been put forward by several authors in the last years (e.g. Hoang 2011, Duflo 2012). For instance, even though the political representation of women improved in the last two decades, their power in terms of decision making is still limited at all levels (Lodigiani and Salomone 2015). Furthermore, the likelihood to work as well as the wage level both continue to be considerably lower for women than for men (Duflo 2012).

Even if this field of research gained importance in the last

However, since a great number of countries all around the globe have seen their percentage of urban population increasing in the past 55 years , major changes have taken place in the ways people live and subsequently also in the overall view of women in society. Indeed, while the population of currently developed countries switched to a predominantly urban one shortly after the Second World War, several developing regions are still undergoing that transformation and are being assumed to accommodate more urban than rural inhabitants only in around 15 years (United Nations 2011). More precisely, the 2014 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects (United Nations 2014) states that 54 percent of the world’s population is nowadays residing in cities, with a forecasting increase up to 66 percent by 2050. That switch has large implications on cultural attitudes and beliefs about the status of women since urbanisation not only involves a surge of female employment opportunities and greater independence of women (Tacoli 2012), but also radically separate spheres of home and work so that women and men start to organize their everyday life differently than before (Thorbek 1988). Urbanisation, simply defined as an increase in the proportion of people living in cities compared to rural areas , goes therefore hand in hand with economic, political and social developments, also in terms of gender issues. As a consequence, the interest of this dissertation is to enrich our understanding of gender norms by studying with econometric analyses the effect urbanisation might have on these