Culture, Kinship and Women’s Labour Opportunities: Evidence from Malawi and Indonesia

Economic and anthropological research has shown that gender roles often originate from ancestral divisions of labor in subsistence activities. This paper examines the impact of ancestral matrilocality on women’s employment status in Malawi and Indonesia, focusing on both employment quantity and quality. Using individual-level data from the Malawi Integrated Household Survey and the Indonesia Family Life Survey, combined with ethnic-level cultural data from Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas, we assess how matrilocality—where husbands relocate to their wives’ families after marriage—affects women’s likelihood of overall employment, wage employment and holding a formal job contract. We find that matrilocality significantly increases women’s likelihood of wage employment, enhances the probability of formal contract work, and reduces overall employment. Mechanisms driving these effects include strengthened household bargaining power and reduced tolerance for gender-based violence among matrilocal women. These results highlight the persistence of ancestral norms in shaping gendered labor market outcomes and support culturally sensitive policy interventions to reduce gender disparities.