We argue that backlash models reinterpreted in an economic framework do not necessarily “ignore the individual rationality constraints faced by women” , but rather take seriously an additional motive on the part of men – that of restoring a self-image of dominance in the household to which they may feel entitled, for example due to cultural norms. A similar theory, in an instrumental framework, would be that men use violence to attempt to address unwanted female behavior associated with employment. The paper is organized as followed. Section 2 describes the rural Ethiopian context and the experiment. In section 3 the main treatment effects are presented and analyzed in light of existing domestic violence models.Ethiopia has some of the highest poverty, illiteracy and underemployment rates in Africa, especially for women. Domestic violence is unusually prevalent; for example, 54 percent of women in a provincial site surveyed by the WHO report to have been victimized by a partner during the last year . At least until recently, a role for domestic violence was accepted in Ethiopian culture – even by many women. In a nationally representative survey conducted in 2005, 81 percent of Ethiopian women found it justified for a husband to beat his wife if the wife had violated norms . In recent years it has become more common for Ethiopian women to hold formal jobs. In rural areas an important contributing factor has been the explosive rise of the floriculture sector, plant benches which mostly employs women. In 2008, 81 flower farms in Ethiopia employed around 50,000 workers . Hiring on Ethiopian flower farms typically takes place in October and November, before the main growing and harvesting season.

The supervisors on five flower farms agreed to randomize job offers during the fall 2008 hiring season because of an unusual situation in the labor market for flower farm workers. At the time, applicants almost always outnumbered the positions to be filled by large margins. Ethiopian flower farms – still getting to grips with cost components significantly larger than labor, and with little ability to predict the productivity of the mostly uneducated, illiterate and inexperienced applicants – did not prioritize optimization of the unskilled workforce . Because supervisors were already allocating job offers relatively arbitrarily when approached by the researchers, explicit randomization was a modest procedural change.The five farms are located in rural areas two and a half to five hours from Addis Ababa and employ local workers who live in small towns nearby the farms. On hiring days, supervisors first excluded any unacceptable applicants. A team of enumerators then carried out the baseline survey with the remaining applicants. Finally, the names of the number of workers to be hired were drawn randomly from a hat. The sample thus consists of 339 households in which a woman applied to a flower farm job and was deemed acceptable for hiring; we focus on the 329 households in which the applicant was married or living with a steady partner. We attempted to re-interview everyone in the treatment and control groups 5 – 7 months after employment commenced. Careful tracking procedures led to a re-interview rate of 88 percent and no statistically significant differential attrition. Summary statistics are displayed in table 1. There are no statistically significant differences between the characteristics of the treatment and control groups. Literacy rates are low. Almost all the applicants are parents. Income and wealth indicators, such as the material that the applicant’s floor is made of, indicate the severe poverty of the sample. Flower farm employment typically entails six days of full-time work a week, totaling on average 202 hours per month. The alternative for the women in our sample was typically domestic work, and perhaps a few hours of informal paid work per week.

The applicants randomly chosen for employment spent 102 more hours per month working . The income of treated women increased by 154 percent on average, which translates into a 28 percent increase in total household income.The estimated treatment effect are in table 3. The probability of experiencing physical violence increases by 8 percentage points or 13 percent when a woman gets employed in rural Ethiopia. There is also a 19 percentage point or 34 percent increase in emotional abuse. Finally, the intensive margin of violence is affected: the number of violent incidents experienced per month goes up by 0.31 or 32 percent following employment. An alternative interpretation of these results is that employment affects women’s willingness to report violence to an enumerator rather than, or in addition to, violence itself. While we cannot rule out a reporting effect, greater willingness to report violence after employment is unlikely to represent the primary explanation of our findings. Specific, detailed survey questions were used. As noted above, the majority of both men and women in Ethiopia find domestic violence justifiable in some situations, and 63 percent of women in our sample were comfortable reporting abuse at baseline. The prediction that physical abuse will decrease when women are “empowered” by employment is central to the most-cited domestic violence models. The estimates in table 3 represent strong evidence against such models, in the context of rural Ethiopia. In the next two sub-sections we categorize pessimistic models on the basis of the hypothesized male motivation for abuse, and explore the ability of different categories of pessimistic models to explain our findings.This paper’s primary result is that domestic violence increases significantly when women get employed in rural Ethiopia.

It appears that there are two categories of models that may be able to explain our results: expressive models in which a husband’s marginal utility from violence is increasing in the economic standing of his wife, and instrumental models in which violence is used to achieve male goals other than control over household resources. We consider these two possibilities in turn. Aizer is an example of an influential class of expressive domestic violence models in which men derive utility directly from violence. Women with better options outside of marriage should be willing to accept less violence at a given “price”: employment is predicted to shift a woman’s violence “supply curve” up and thus decrease violence. Consider, however, that a husband’s violence “demand curve” may also shift up when his wife gets employed, if the husband’s marginal utility from violence is increasing in the wife’s relative or absolute economic standing. The net outcome may be that the couple’s contract curve – the set of feasible bargaining solutions – shifts up in space, and that violence itself therefore increases. Why would the marginal utility that men in Ethiopia derive from violence go up when women get employed? Suppose that there are emotional costs to men of perceived violations of traditional gender roles. In that case “violence may be a means of reinstating [a husband’s] authority over his wife” . If improvements in women’s economic standing carry emotional costs to men, events that symbolize the perceived challenge to traditional gender roles can likely lead to violence. In columns two and four of table 4 we interact the treatment indicator with the wife’s ex ante income as a share of the combined income of the husband and wife. The results show that the impact of employment on violence is bigger in households in which the newly employed wife is likely to end up further ahead of her husband in income because her share of baseline income was high relative to that of other women in the sample. The increase in the probability of violence when a wife gets employed is seven percentage points higher for every one standard deviation increase in the wife’s share of baseline income, almost as much as the average effect. There is also a small but marginally significant increase in male labor supply when women get employed in rural Ethiopia. Though alternative explanations are possible, these results are consistent with a plausible story in which improvements in the relative economic standing of women carry emotional costs to men; costs that some men choose to act upon through violence. A similar possibility is that violence serves an instrumental purpose, rolling benches but is used not to gain control over household resources but instead to influence the behavior of wives . Husbands may see some dimensions of female behavior associated with employment as undesirable and potentially “correctable” through violence. The arguably most plausible “real” cost to husbands of female employment is that employed wives devote less time to house-work. In our sample, most of the housework of women randomly chosen for employment is taken over by daughters , however. This suggests that costs to husbands of a reallocation of women’s time may, if anything, be due the overturning of traditional responsibilities in the household, rather than house-work being left undone.

In sum, the evidence presented here suggests that emotional costs associated with violations of traditional gender roles belong in theories of domestic violence in gender-unequal societies. If so, identity models, in which disutility is associated with a self-image that de-viates from the individual’s view of his or her “appropriate” role in the household, are a natural starting point . In the appendix we present an example of a framework in which a husband’s incentive to engage in violence depends on his wife’s economic standing relative to his own – as does, in turn, the wife’s response to violence. The framework allows a male “backlash” when women get employed and predicts how domestic violence responds to female employment in Ethiopia well.This paper has analyzed the impact of female employment on domestic violence through a field experiment in which women’s long-term job offers on Ethiopian flower farms were randomized. We estimate a significant 13 percent increase in physical violence when women get employed, as well as large increases in emotional abuse and the intensity of physical violence. These results put into question the relevance of conventional economic models of domestic violence in male-dominated developing countries. Like much existing anti-violence policy, conventional models are “optimistic” in the sense of considering labor force participation a promising route to empowering women and reducing the prevalence of domestic violence. Most “pessimistic” models argue that physical abuse can increase when employment enhances wives’ incomes and bargaining power because husbands use violence as a tool to get access to and control over household resources. But we find no significant correlation between levels of violence and control over household resources, nor changes in violence and control when women get employed, and the reason does not appear to be that violence is used to counteract female bargaining power. Rather than a male quest for control over household resources, it appears that the models that best explain our results would allow men to care about roles in the household deviating from the roles prescribed by traditional norms, and violence being seen as a way to restore a preferred order. We find that the increase in the probability of violence following female employment is greater in households in which the newly employed woman is likely to end up further ahead of her husband in income. The costs to a husband of lost economic dominance are presumably primarily emotional, suggesting that the benefits of turning to violence in response may also be emotional. It may be that men derive “expressive” utility from violence and, while a woman’s “violence supply curve” likely shifts up when her outside option improves, her husband’s “violence demand curve” also shifts up because his marginal utility from violence depends on his wife’s relative economic standing. A similar “instrumental violence” interpretation would be that men abuse their wives not to achieve financial control but rather, for example, to influence their wives’ behavior in the household. We conclude that: conventional optimistic economic models of domestic violence are unlikely to accurately describe the situation in most households in male-dominated developing countries such as Ethiopia; and not all men will passively accept challenges to their economic dominance, and successful models of domestic violence will likely need to account for the male reaction to female economic progress. Finally, it is worth emphasizing that the increase in domestic violence we observe when women get employed does not mean that women are not empowered by employment. Forexample, it may be that some women previously acquiesced in the face of demands from their husbands but choose not to when emboldened by employment.