Why should men care about women's rights?

UCLA's Matthias Doepkey and Stanford's Michèle Tertilt ask a good question about women's rights and development: Women’s Liberation: What Was in It for Men? (PDF). Here is their answer:

Women’s rights are closely related to economic development. This is true both across countries, where women have most rights in the richest countries, and in time series data: women have slowly improved their legal position in parallel with fast improvements in the standard of living. In most cases, the initial extension of rights to women amounted to a voluntary renouncement of power by men.

In this paper, we investigate the economic incentives for men to share power with women. We show that men may want to voluntarily relinquish some of their power once technological change increases the importance of human capital. The reason is that men face a tradeoff between how they would ideally like to treat their own wives and how they want other women to be treated. While men might want little rights for their own wives, they may prefer their daughters to have a better bargaining position with future husbands. In addition, a wife’s education matters for producing high-quality children. A husband prefers his children to find high-quality mates, and therefore stands to gain from increasing the power of his children’s mothers-in-law.

Men have wives - but they also have daughters. Indeed, seeing the world through a daughters' eyes can make even the most macho or chauvinistic man reconsider their attitudes on gender equality.

For those near Yale, Michèle Tertilt is presenting the paper there on Monday 15 October to their Development Workshop

Comments

[jpf]

This just goes on to show how you can fit fancy (non-credible) stories to a set of numbers. If we extrapolate the same logic, white people's suppport for civil rights for non-whites (or even the end of slavery) would then stem because white men were planning to have children with black women?
More likely, there are stages when people do realise how unjust certain social structures are. Wife beating may have been acceptable in the past, but it's no longer so, and the reason is probably because people's values have changed.

[jsalvati]

jpf,

I don't think it is appropriate to think of value changes as exogenous.

[Lafayette]

Dare one say that there exists a purely non-economic reason for "womens' rights"?

It is morally repugnant that, as humans, they should NOT be treated as men?

May I suggest that this is far more important than pseudo-intellectual justifications on any other level?