Sexism, State, Market, and Society: Evidence from Rural Tigray, Northern Ethiopia

Abstract

Our study site is a social island of a Muslim population found within an Orthodox Christian dominated national state. What is peculiar about this site, however, is related to the high level of sexist attitude observed in this location. The farmers in the site were not only sexist, but their sexism was not even a benevolent kind of sexism, which tries to protect the “delicate and weak woman”. Their sexism was a hostile kind of sexism, which tries to preserve men’s favorable status by imposing and sustaining an inferior perception of a woman. Data is collected from 190 families who reside in four villages of Southern Tigray in Ethiopia. A probit and a sample selection endogenous switching models are used to analyze the data. The results do show the fact that the source of the problem is well known in contemporary literature of sexism as a social dominance orientation ideology.

Keywords: sexism, aggressive sexism, benevolent sexism, social capital, organized trust, harmony, commercialization, SDO, RWA

JEL Classification: Z13, J16