Gendered Norms of Violence: Female Education, Economic Empowerment, and Women's Acceptance of Wife Beating Across Countries

Abstract

The persistence of social norms that legitimize intimate partner violence represents an important behavioral dimension of gender inequality. This study examined the relationships of female education, women’s employment structure, and gender parity in labor-force participation with women’s acceptance of wife beating across countries. Using World Development Indicators data from 1999 to 2023, the analysis focused on the percentage of women aged 15–49 who considered wife beating justified for at least one of five specified reasons. Female lower-secondary completion, female wage and salaried employment, and the female-to-male labor-force participation ratio served as the principal explanatory variables. The dataset contained 190 country-survey observations from 72 countries. A latest-observation cross-sectional model included 64 countries, while fixed-effects analysis used 149 observations from 47 countries with repeated survey waves. Cross-sectional results indicated that higher female educational completion and greater wage and salaried employment were associated with lower acceptance of wife beating, whereas labor-force participation parity was not significant. After adjustment for national development, urbanization, fertility, and survey year, female wage and salaried employment remained significant. However, country fixed-effects models showed that changes in education and economic participation did not significantly explain within-country changes in violence-accepting attitudes. The findings indicate that economic participation should not automatically be equated with normative empowerment and that structural advancement and transformation of gendered violence norms constitute related but distinct social processes.