Culture and gender roles: Evidence from a natural experiment in Post-Soviet Central Asia

Examining characteristics of traditional nomadic herding cultures and traditional sedentary farming cultures, both of which are deeply established in Central Asian history, I contribute to the literature on the foundations and persistence of gender roles in culture. Using a natural experiment resulting from a series of events in Kyrgyzstan during the Soviet rule of Central Asia that exogenously determined district-level cultural composition, I investigate whether there is greater gender inequality today amongst individuals from traditional sedentary farming cultures (in contrast to traditional nomadic herding cultures). This approach is unique from the standard epidemiological approach to studies of culture, which look at immigrants in new setting with a set of institutions and environment, to which they typically only bring their culture. In contrast, the Soviet rule of Central Asia provides a setting in which, once the district-level cultural compositions were exogenously arranged, a set of new standardized policies and institutions were universally implemented to wipe out the gender inequality in the region. Results indicate that the Soviet policies were quite effective at improving educational institutions; however, it appears as though differences between cultures in other indicators of gender inequality persist, including those that might affect females’ ability to participate in the labor force. These include the use of contraception and gender roles in time intensive home production activities, such as water collection. Results also indicate that perceptions of domestic violence differ along these historical cultural lines. JEL codes: D10, J16, N30. 1 School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan. Email: [email protected]. I am grateful for comments given by Rohini Pande, Rema Hanna, Michael Kremer, Bill Clark, members of the Harvard Sustainability Science Program, and seminar participants from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program lunch seminar. Merim Japarova provided excellent research assistance. All errors remain my own. 2 “The delineation of the five Central Asian republics “fixed ancient cultural and linguistic distinctions: between the nomads of the steppes (Kazakhstan), of the desert (Turkmenistan) and of the mountains (Kyrgyzstan), and the sedentary Turkic (Uzbekistan) and Persian speakers (Tajikistan).”