TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Aminjonov, Ulugbek
AU  - Bargain, Olivier B.
        TI  - Configurations of Ancestral Norms and Women’s Empowerment
        PY  - 2026/Sep/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 18955
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp18955
        AB  - 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.
        KW  - women’s empowerment
KW  - ancestral norms
KW  - cultural persistence
KW  - kinship systems
KW  - machine learning
KW  - gender inequality
KW  - DHS
KW  - Ethnographic Atlas
        ER  -