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Alice Evans is a senior lecturer in international development at King's College London and the author of the forthcoming book The Great Gender Divergence.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Alice Evans discuss the influence of cultural and religious norms in promoting or stifling gender equality; how we can advocate for improvements in gender equality while minimizing the risks of backlash; and why fertility has plummeted around the world.
The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: You're asking a big question in your current research, which is why some places end up being really gender equal and other places not at all.
What degree of difference are we talking about? What are some of the patterns here?
Alice Evans: So let's look at the descriptive data in terms of employment, leadership, attitudes, and gender-based violence. If we look at female share of labor income, there is huge heterogeneity. Much of Europe will earn 44% of total labor income, whereas in Sudan, Egypt, India, it is very, very small, single-digit figures.
The big difference is in female labor force participation. Across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, female employment is between 20 to 30%, which is well below the global average. If we look at leadership, again, there is massive heterogeneity; across Scandinavia there is a very strong share of female representation. In Latin America there are 11 legislative assemblies which actually mandate gender parity, and you've just seen two women fight it out for the presidency in Mexico.
There is also huge heterogeneity in terms of people's acceptance of men sharing care work, men's entitlement to a job, support for female leadership. There are so many different variables, none of which are perfect. But if we put them all together to create a jigsaw it shows what I call the “great gender divergence.” And just as so many economists and political scientists have tried to explain why the West is rich and democratic while other countries aren't, I'm asking exactly the same question about gender.
Mounk: So in some places, most women work. They have a relatively equal share of overall market wages and there's greater safety, etc. In other places, there's much bigger challenges around that. Why is that?
We're at a moment in which, in the social sciences, people often tend to give non-cultural explanations for things; one of the main things that people might think is that it’s perhaps because these societies are just at different levels of economic development. But you think that culture matters as well in explaining this outcome.
So what do you think explains why some parts of the world are so much more gender equal than others?
Evans: So first of all, let me clarify that I think that around 1900, much of the world was very patriarchal. It wasn't that there was this Western advantage, or that the West has always worked. Our Enlightenment, our scholars, our scientists, our parliaments, and our judiciary were incredibly patriarchal, a total sausage fest. But then there is a big disruption, and I do think economics and politics are important here. So over the 20th century, skill bias and technological change are ramping up demand for skilled labor. That happens across the world. These factories open up and women seize the economic opportunities they create. It's also mediated by technology: When women have contraceptives they can control their fertility, further their education and then build careers.
So job-creating economic growth is a major engine of gender equality. But it’s mediated by several further factors, including culture. In some communities across much of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, male honor depends on female seclusion: Men gain their status and social inclusion within their communities by guarding and protecting their female kin and maintaining very close-knit surveillance. And so that means that even as incomes rise, female employment stays well below the national average.
If you look at the Middle East and South Asia compared to other countries with exactly the same wealth, female employment is very low. There's this wonderful new randomized control trial that offers $300 a month to slum-dwelling women in Mumbai. Only 20% of women take those jobs. Why? Because their husbands say no. Because their husband’s status is contingent upon them being the breadwinner and women remaining at home.
Different communities attach different weights to what I call “honor versus income.” So there's this honor/income trade-off. Female employment will only rise when the income is sufficiently high to compensate for the loss of male honor. And that's precisely what happened in Asia.
Mounk: Social scientists who think that this is ultimately more about economic factors might respond to this by saying: “Well, look, perhaps culture just is a delayed response to economic change.” You go back, as you were saying, to Europe in the Middle Ages, and you have many of the same norms where male honor depends on control of women; where the idea of women would be unimaginable in important parts of the workforce.
But then it's because of economic change that you start to see cultural change in those places. So what's the model here? Is it that you need that economic and technological change in order for the cultural change to happen? Tell me a little bit more precisely where the interplay here is between technology and culture.
Evans: As part of my methodology, I study the cultural evolution of every single society in the world. So let's look at the Middle East, North Africa and Anatolia. In Turkey, the religious ulama was losing credibility over the 19th century because, as the Ottoman Empire was crumbling, the jadids in Central Asia were massively criticizing the mullahs: “They're holding us back, they're retarding scientific progress.” They really want to embrace a secularizing, liberalizing, westernizing process of reform because they think that religious dogma has failed. So you see across the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s leaders like Ataturk.
There's this really cool new technology called Google Arts and Culture; I look at all the images from Egypt's history from the pharaohs to the present day, and what I see when I'm looking at the 1920s and 1930s is adverts for women wearing bras, and holiday pictures and postcards with women in bikinis. This is a small elite—but that elite is increasingly keen to embrace secular ideas. You see that right across Tunisia, in Egypt, you see it in Turkey and in Iran—even in tiny little pockets of Afghanistan.
But that falters for two reasons. One, arguably, is that Egypt's economic stagnation meant that modernizing reforms lost legitimacy. But [these reforms] also triggered a religious backlash: Many Muslims in Egypt who are still very conservative and very religious mobilized in response. Right across Saudi Arabia, across Egypt, if you look at periodicals, you can see that religious people are mobilizing.
Every single culture has its unique cultural inheritance. There's always heterogeneity. So you'll always have progressives and conservatives pushing on either side. At one point the liberal elites in Egypt were pushing for more liberalism. But then that triggered a backlash—so ultimately the leaders of Egypt and other countries cloaked themselves in Islam in order to gain legitimacy with an increasing;y religious public. And then we see the rise of veiling. And that became widespread right across Egypt, for example.
Mounk: So a lot of what you've been saying is convincing. But help me think through the difference between the individual level and the collective level here.
So I absolutely buy that there can be a community in which people individually have a set of preferences, but collectively are not able to achieve or accomplish those. And part of that reason is about what Timur Kuran explained in his work, and his episode of this podcast, on preference falsification—secretly, you might have a bunch of people, for example, who don't want to wear the hijab. But that's not a revealed preference, and any one person who first takes off the hijab is going to be punished by the neighbors, by their community, treated badly and accused of bad things. So nobody takes it off.
But when you think of something like Kuran's work, there also is the possibility of a preference cascade. When the norms of the collective are not supported by the preferences of individuals, that state of affairs can last for a very long time. But it can also be broken rather quickly. There's something inherently unstable about that setup. So perhaps the young women in some of these societies are looking to Saudi Arabia. But others may be watching Netflix shows.
Are those societies going to be able to resist that kind of cultural change forever? You point to Saudi Arabia. And I know you've thought about that place and spent some time there. It is a place that is very repressive for women, and it is also a very dictatorial place. Certainly, Saudi Arabia hasn't converged with Western countries. But if you're being optimistic, you could say: “It seems to be in a process of evolution in a way that just wasn’t true five or 10 years ago.”
Evans: Absolutely. And let's definitely talk about Saudi Arabia, because back in the 1960s female employment in Saudi Arabia was around 5%, which was typical for the Arabian Peninsula. And now what we've seen, from maybe around 2017, is what I call a “trilemma,” in that they want to diversify the economy, to move away from oil, to branch into tourism, etc. They want to control and prevent religious dissent, but they don't want the conservatives to get too upset with the changes that are happening. They want to enable greater cultural liberalization and secularization, but they don't want the liberals to be too outspoken. So how do you maximize those three variables?
I definitely think of community cultural norms as part of a coordination problem, exactly as Timur Kuran is saying. By observing communities we get a sense of what is respected, esteemed or condemned.
I've been interviewing women and they were saying “No woman has ever left this village,” right? And so no woman would want to do that, because then people would start gossiping. So there's a real coordination problem and what the Saudi government has done is to overcome it through media. So Shahid MBC, which is the state-owned equivalent of Netflix, shows lots and lots of films of professional women—and not just showing those women but showing them being supported. So one of the films is about this conservative father feeling a bit uncomfortable with it all, but over the episode he becomes really, really supportive. Television is so enormously powerful because it creates these immersive realities that transport us—we laugh, giggle, cry, and empathize. And with great acting, it can feel really realistic. So whether it's a Hollywood or Saudi producer, they can make us shift our perceptions about what's really happening in the world. And then if we look at female employment—boom, it's doubled in recent years. Over the past 15 years, women going to cinemas, going to restaurants, owning property, and driving a car have all boomed. All these indicators of female mobility are massively on the up. So in this way, they overcame this coordination failure by basically creating ideological propaganda, which is similar to what happened in communism. And so definitely there is that possibility for movement within that unique cultural inheritance.
Now, do I think Saudi Arabia is going to become similar to Europe? No, but definitely there is always scope for wiggle room. Now, conservative Muslims across the world are very upset with what's happening in Saudi Arabia right now. For example, there are limits on how loud the call to prayer can be. Some people complain that Jeddah has become too commercialized, etc. So there is this very delicate balancing act.
Mounk: So there is this ongoing battle, and you can see modernization and then some of the conservative adversaries successfully pushing back against it.
If you're thinking intelligently about how to make change, how to make the world more gender equal, you need to think in two tracks, right? One is how you maximize movement towards some of those norms, but also how you ensure that that movement itself and the way you advocate for it doesn't feed into some of that backlash. I don't know the literature well enough to know whether or not it’s true, but I've seen some papers arguing that some of the good work done by NGOs in pushing for more gay rights in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, has ended up being very damaging, because while what they were arguing for was, in itself, something I would agree with, it has led to this massive counterreaction and counter-mobilization by local populations and local elites. And that has led to much harsher persecution of sexual minorities than was there before this became a kind of more salient political issue.
Evans: I completely agree and I call this the “great gay divergence,” and this goes back to what I was saying that every country has its unique cultural inheritance (with progressives and conservatives), but if progressives push too hard and if they go too far beyond the median citizen then that's going to trigger this conservative patriarchal mobilization. So in Uganda today it is 10 years imprisonment for anyone affiliated with LGBT, and there have been similar legal moves in Kenya and Ghana. Absolutely, you can trigger backlash.
I think the media can be a really powerful tool. So for example there was this really nice analysis using LLMs looking at Bollywood and Hollywood, and they were showing that, overwhelmingly, Bollywood strips have tended to talk about honor and shame, and to say that male honor depends on female chastity. So there are so many narratives over the 1990s that, you know, a woman is abducted and raped and then the state is incapable and the brother has to defend her honor. So the media can reinforce people's fears. And we now see another technological challenge—that as much of the world increasingly has smartphone technology, this enables everyone to self-select into their own echo-chambers. I might use my phone to check out the latest news on the Financial Times, that's what I find exciting and interesting. But many other people will be in totally different filter bubbles in which they're repeatedly praising each other for that particular ideology. And that is what we're now seeing in South Korea, for example. So even though women are surging into the workforce, even though it's democratic, even though there's lots of economic growth, women are increasingly going into female echo-chambers which reinforce progressive gender ideologies. Women are becoming increasingly critical of all those patriarchal, Confucian ideologies. But men are not. Men are in a totally different echo-chamber. There was one news story that on a Telegram chat 220,000 members were sharing deep-fake pornography, and male communities will be rewarding and praising each other for humiliating women: “Great shot, brother!” It's a way of humiliating and degrading women.
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These male communities will be championing and cheering each other on, and signaling that in this peer community that is totally accepted. And then what happens is that as we get these fault lines, people might only see the most progressive example or the most extremist example from the other camps. There's that wonderful US report from More in Common, where they say it's the extremes of either end who are most vocal right now, and it’s those people from the either end that will get quoted and trigger animosity from the other side. So to go back to your example of backlash there was a Korean feminist group, an extremist group that is not representative, that uses this symbol mocking men for having tiny members. And so that was just one extremist example, but that triggered patriarchal backlash and that feeds into this idea that feminists are aggressive, that feminists are out to get us, that feminists are hostile, etc. So across the world, feminists don't have a great reputation. They're often seen as hostile, but this really triggers this backlash.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Alice discuss solutions for the global fertility crisis. This discussion is reserved for paying members...
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