Women, Children and Patience: Experimental Evidence from Indian Villages

• Date: 01 November 2013
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/rode.12057
• Author: Michal Bauer,Julie Chytilová
• Published date: 01 November 2013

Women, Children and Patience: Experimental

Evidence from Indian Villages

Michal Bauer and Julie Chytilová*

Abstract

Researchers have observed that women in developing countries often make more development friendly

choices than men. We implemented experimental tasks among a large and diverse sample of married indi-

viduals in rural India and found women to make on average more patient and more risk-averse choices

than men. We find important heterogeneity in gender differences in patience: there is no difference for

spouses with no children but patience levels diverge if there are small children in a family. The findings

imply that conflicting spousal preferences are most likely in poor families with children.

1. Introduction

Researchers and policy-makers have often observed that individual decisions vary by

gender. In the context of developing countries, women are hypothesized to make

more future-oriented choices than men, especially if these choices concern children.

Researchers have found that a greater income share in the hands of women leads to

higher child survival probability (Gleason, 2003; Thomas, 1990), increases educational

expenditures (Quisumbing and Maluccio, 2003) and enhances the anthropometric

status of girls (Duflo, 2003). This evidence has motivated departures from the neoclas-

sical unitary household model, which assumes homogenous preferences of spouses,

towards more complex models of intra-household bargaining, assuming conflicting

preferences (for a survey see Xu, 2007). The evidence and experience has led many

development practitioners to highlight gender equality as a powerful means of human

development in poor countries and to emphasize the gender of recipients as a factor

potentially decisive for the efficiency of public policies (US Agency for International

Development, 1982). This view has also influenced the design of many public pro-

grams aimed at reducing poverty. The prime example is the conditional cash-transfer

program Progresa—one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs in the world—

which deals almost exclusively with women (World Bank, 2009).

However, we cannot infer much about preferences from observing behavior. Two

questions are particularly important: Are the differences in behavior linked with basic

preferences towards time, risk and/or towards others? Is the gender difference in pref-

erences stable, perhaps immutable and determined by a long-term process of selec-

tion, or does it vary and can it be predicted by observable characteristics?

* Chytilová: Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies, Opletalova 26,

Prague 1, 110 00, Czech Republic. Tel: +420-222-112-322; Fax: +420-222-112-304; E-mail: chytilova@

fsv.cuni.cz. Bauer: Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies and

CERGE-EI, a joint workplace of Charles University and the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sci-

ences of the Czech Republic, Politických veˇznˇu˚ 7, 111 21 Prague, Czech Republic. We thank R. Filer, I.

Gang, D. Malunda, A. Mayer, J. Morduch, D. Munich, A. Ortmann, S. Pratap, D. Ray, D. Thomas for valu-

able comments, and BPKS and Caritas Prague, especially Jarmila Lomozová, for collaboration on the field-

work. The research was supported by a grant from the CERGE-EI Foundation under a program of the

Global Development Network and by the Czech Science Foundation (13-20217S).

Review of Development Economics, 17(4), 662–675, 2013

DOI:10.1111/rode.12057

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd