Configurations of Ancestral Norms and Women’s Empowerment

This paper examines how combinations of ancestral cultural norms are associated with women’s empowerment across ethnic groups worldwide. Linking DHS data to the Ethnographic Atlas, we develop a hybrid supervised–unsupervised approach combining Partial Least Squares and k-means clustering to identify five probabilistic normative regimes. Severe disempowerment is associated with an accumulation of restrictive norms, while religious norms and women’s agricultural roles distinguish higher-empowerment environments within broadly patriarchal configurations. Further up the gradient, contrasts concern hierarchical social institutions, then kinship and the loosening of patriarchal arrangements, before more gender-neutral configurations prevail at the highest empowerment levels. Norms’ salience varies with the configurations in which they are embedded, revealing strongly non-monotonic patterns. These findings are robust to adjustment for contemporary socioeconomic conditions and a range of sensitivity checks. The analysis provides a global mapping of ancestral normative environments associated with women’s agency and identifies configurations most closely related to severe intra-household inequality.