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Why Do Women Co-Operate More in Women's Groups?
[collection article]
Abstract A substantial amount of development programming assumes that women have preferences or aptitudes that are more conducive to economic development. For example, conditional cash transfer programmes commonly deliver funding to female household heads, and many microcredit schemes focus on women’s saving... view more
A substantial amount of development programming assumes that women have preferences or aptitudes that are more conducive to economic development. For example, conditional cash transfer programmes commonly deliver funding to female household heads, and many microcredit schemes focus on women’s savings groups. This chapter examines a public goods game in northern Liberia. Women contributed substantially more to a small-scale development project when playing with other women than in mixed-gender groups, where they contributed at about the same levels as men. We try to explain this composition effect using a structural model, survey responses, and a second manipulation. Results suggest women in the all-women group put more weight on co-operation regardless of the value of the public good, the fear of discovery, or the desire to match others’ behaviour. We conjecture that players have stronger motivation to signal public-spiritedness when primed to consider themselves representatives of the women of the community.... view less
Keywords
economic development (on national level); Liberia; woman; collective behavior; gender-specific factors; nonmarket good; West Africa
Classification
Women's Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender Studies
Sociology of Developing Countries, Developmental Sociology
Free Keywords
gender; microcredit schemes; public goods; women's savings groups
Collection Title
Towards Gender Equity in Development
Editor
Anderson, Siwan; Beaman, Lori; Platteau, Jean-Philippe
Document language
English
Publication Year
2018
Publisher
Oxford University Press
City
Oxford
Page/Pages
p. 217-236
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/10419/191924
ISBN
978-0-19-882959-1
Status
Published Version; reviewed
Licence
Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0