Legal Equality Isn’t Enough: The Cultural Roots Behind Gender Gaps in Work and Law

In a compelling new working paper researchers from the World Bank’s South Asia Region Office of the Chief Economist, Maurizio Bussolo, Jonah M. Rexer, and Lynn Hu, offer a groundbreaking examination of how entrenched social norms, shaped by pre-modern patriarchal cultures, continue to influence gender equality in today’s legal systems and labor markets. Supported by global datasets and institutional collaboration with CARE, UNICEF, and Facebook (which provided the infrastructure for the social norms survey), the study also uses political data from the Global Party Survey and the Database of Political Institutions to chart a complex but powerful story: legal reform alone is insufficient for advancing gender equality, it must be accompanied by social and political transformation.

The Cultural DNA of Inequality

At the heart of this study lies the idea that today’s legal and economic inequalities are often the legacy of cultural patterns established centuries ago. The researchers construct an “Ancestral Patriarchal Culture” (APC) index, based on ethnographic data that tracks the historical presence of traits such as polygamy, early marriage, patrilocality, and patrilineality. Countries that score high on this index, the study finds, are more likely to harbor regressive gender norms in the present day. These deeply rooted attitudes have a chilling effect on women’s legal rights and workforce participation, regardless of the country’s current income level or development status.

What makes this framework particularly powerful is that it ties modern outcomes to historical cultural inheritance. Since ancestral norms predate contemporary legal and economic systems, using the APC index as a statistical instrument allows the authors to make stronger causal claims. They show that patriarchal cultures cast a long shadow: even today, they are associated with lower levels of gender-equal legislation, poorer enforcement of existing laws, and substantial gender gaps in employment.

Expectations Matter More Than Beliefs

One of the study’s most compelling findings is the distinction it draws between personal beliefs and social expectations. Personal beliefs reflect what an individual privately thinks about gender roles, while social expectations reflect what individuals believe others in their community think. The data shows that social expectations, so-called “second-order beliefs”, are much more closely correlated with legal inequality and women’s labor market exclusion. For example, someone might personally support gender equality but still vote against progressive laws out of fear of social disapproval.

This dynamic helps explain why laws that support women’s rights often fail to be implemented or respected. In societies where people believe that others continue to expect women to be homemakers or dependent on male providers, legal rights become hollow. The researchers quantify this effect, showing that a one-point increase in regressive social expectations around women’s roles results in a two-point drop in legal equality and a 1.4 percentage point fall in female labor force participation. These impacts are stronger than those identified using personal beliefs alone.

When Laws and Norms Clash

While many international development efforts focus on legislative reform as a pathway to equality, the study cautions that such efforts may falter if they do not consider social norms. The authors identify what they call an “implementation gap”, the difference between the existence of a legal right and its practical accessibility. For example, even if women are legally permitted to obtain identification documents or own land, prevailing community attitudes might still require them to seek male approval, making those rights effectively meaningless.

This disconnect is most pronounced in societies with high levels of ancestral patriarchy, where regressive gender expectations create strong resistance to both legal change and its enforcement. Conversely, in liberal societies where norms already support gender equality, additional laws may have limited marginal impact because the social environment already permits women's economic participation. The result is a U-shaped curve: legal reforms matter most in countries where norms are moderately conservative, neither too liberal to make them redundant, nor too patriarchal to make them irrelevant.

Politics as a Mirror of Norms

The researchers also identify a powerful political mechanism connecting norms to laws. In democratic and semi-authoritarian countries alike, gender norms influence voting behavior and party platforms. Conservative societies are more likely to elect political parties that oppose gender-equal legislation. Using seat-share data from over 160 countries, the study shows that once pro-women parties attain majority representation in parliaments, significant gains in legal gender equality follow. The effect is nonlinear: modest gains in pro-women seat shares do little, but once a party crosses the 50% threshold, the legal landscape begins to shift decisively.

Importantly, this political mechanism is also driven more by social expectations than personal beliefs. The fear of violating collective norms, rather than personal opposition to equality, drives much of the resistance to progressive leadership. Voters may avoid backing pro-women candidates not because they disagree with them, but because they fear social stigma. The research, therefore, argues that political change cannot be decoupled from social change: they move together.

A Dual Pathway to Equality

The study ends on a nuanced but hopeful note. It affirms that legal reform remains vital, but insufficient, when confronted with deeply entrenched norms. The evidence points to a dual pathway for achieving gender equality: transforming laws and transforming the beliefs that underpin them. Encouragingly, the authors cite emerging evidence that social norms can shift faster than previously thought, especially when interventions correct misperceptions about community attitudes. Public awareness campaigns, gender-sensitive education, and increased female political visibility can all help close the gap between belief and expectation.

Ultimately, the report provides a roadmap for gender equality that extends beyond legal drafting rooms and into the social and political fabric of nations. It argues that change is not just a matter of enacting better laws, but of changing the social climate in which those laws are made and enforced. And for that, understanding the long memory of patriarchal culture is a necessary first step.