Conflict and the Roots of Gender Norms in India

We investigate the relationship between exposure to pre-modern conflict and malefavoring gender norms. We argue that men’s physical advantage in battle helped transmit cultural norms favoring males and male offspring. We focus on India, a large developing country displaying significant spatial variation in gender-related outcomes. We show robust evidence that areas with high exposure to pre-colonial conflict are significantly more likely to exhibit male-favoring gender norms as proxied by male-biased sex ratios, the probability of having female children, and crimes against women. We document how conflict-related gender norms have been transmitted across time via folkloric traditions, Hindu temple gods, and patrilocal exogamy, and have been transmitted across space by migrants no longer living in ancestral zones of high conflict exposure.