Hallward-Driemeier, M., and Gajigo, O. (2015), “Strengthening economic rights and women’s occupational choice: The impact of reforming Ethiopia’s family law,” World Development, 70, pp. 260–273.
This paper evaluates the impact of strengthening legal rights on the types of economic opportunities pursued. Ethiopia changed its family law, expanding women’s access to marital property and removing restrictions on working outside the home. The authors investigate whether the opportunities that women successfully pursued were widened by changes in laws that gave women more control over property and removed barriers to employment. This reform was initially rolled out in the two chartered cities and three of Ethiopia’s nine regions, allowing for a difference-in-difference estimation of the reform’s impact.
The analysis reveals that where the reform had been implemented, women were noticeably more likely to hold paid full-time jobs, occupations that required work outside the home, and jobs that employed more educated workers. The reform also provided relatively stronger incentives for women to work full-time and stated that as their economic opportunities grew, so would investments in their education, increasing the likelihood that they would pursue higher-skilled occupations. Younger women, who are better equipped to adapt to the change than older women, are likely to experience larger effects.
The other finding of this study is that the impact of the law varies across different groups of women, adding to the growing body of evidence that addressing gender inequality in family laws has significant economic benefits for women. For instance, young, single women appear to be most affected by the law, with a relative increase in women’s participation that is 15–24% higher than in non-reforming areas. The increased first marriage age appears to be having a significant impact on young women. It is stated that raising the legal minimum age for marriage for women has a direct impact on this, or it may have an indirect impact by improving the economic opportunities for women to work.
The new Family Law also significantly raises the proportion of women working outside the home for almost all groups. According to the paper’s conclusion, these findings support earlier findings that securing property rights enhances people’s capacity to pursue economic opportunities. This should motivate initiatives to close gender gaps in economic and property rights in order to support women’s economic empowerment.