Introduction
This study reproduces the results of the article Relationship of gender differences in preferences to economic development and gender equality (DOI: 10.1126/science.aas9899) and partially its supplementary material.
The code for the analysis can be found at the following GitHub page: https://github.com/scerioli/Global-Preferences-Survey
Preparation of the data
Data Collection, Cleaning, and Standardization
The data used in the Falk & Hermle 2018 is not fully available because of two reasons:
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Data paywall: Some part of the data is not available for free. It requires to pay a fee to the Gallup to access them. This is the case for the additional data set that is used in the article, for instance, the one that contains the education level and the household income quintile. Check the website of the briq - Institute on Behavior & Inequality for more information on it.
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Data used in study is not available online: This is what happened for the LogGDP p/c calculated in 2005 US dollars (which is not directly available online). We decided to calculate the LogGDP p/c in 2010 US dollars because it was easily available, which should not change the main findings of the article.
Global Preferences Survey
This data is protected by copyright and cannot be given to third parties.
To download the GPS data set, go to the website of the Global Preferences Survey in the section "downloads". There, choose the "Dataset" form and after filling it, we can download the data set.
Hint: The organisation can be also "private".
The following two relevant papers have to be also cited in all publications that make use of or refer in any kind to GPS dataset:
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Falk, A., Becker, A., Dohmen, T., Enke, B., Huffman, D., & Sunde, U. (2018). Global evidence on economic preferences. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133 (4), 1645–1692.
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Falk, A., Becker, A., Dohmen, T. J., Huffman, D., & Sunde, U. (2016). The preference survey module: A validated instrument for measuring risk, time, and social preferences. IZA Discussion Paper No. 9674.
GDP per capita
From the website of the World Bank, one can access the data about the GDP per capita on a certain set of years. We took the GDP per capita (constant 2010 US$), made an average of the data from 2003 until 2012 for all the available countries, and matched the names of the countries with the ones from the GPS data set.
Gender Equality Index
The Gender Equality Index is composed of four main data sets.
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Time since women’s suffrage: Taken from the Inter-Parliamentary Union Website. We prepared the data in the following way. For several countries more than one date where provided (for example, the right to be elected and the right to vote). We use the last date when both vote and stand for election right were granted, with no other restrictions commented. Some counties were a colony or within union of the countries (for instance, Kazakhstan in Soviet Union). For these countries, the rights to vote and be elected might be technically granted two times within union and as independent state. In this case we kept the first date. It was difficult to decide on South Africa because its history shows the racism part very entangled with women's rights. We kept the latest date when also Black women could vote. For Nigeria, considered the distinctions between North and South, we decided to keep only the North data because, again, it was showing the completeness of the country and it was the last date. Note: USA data doesn't take into account that also up to 1964 black women couldn't vote (in general, Blacks couldn't vote up to that year). We didn’t keep this date, because it was not explicitly mentioned in the original data set. This is in contrast with other choices made, but it is important to reproduce exactly the results of the publication, and the USA is often easy to spot on the plots.
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UN Gender Inequality Index: Taken from the Human Development Report 2015. We kept only the table called "Gender Inequality Index".
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WEF Global Gender Gap: WEF Global Gender Gap Index Taken from the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2015. For countries where data were missing, data was added from the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2006. We modified some of the country names directly in the csv file, that is why we provide it as an input file.
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Ratio of female and male labour force participation: Average International Labour Organization estimates from 2003 to 2012 taken from the World Bank database (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FM.ZS). Values were inverted to create an index of equality. We took the average for the period between 2004 and 2013.
In our extended analysis, we also involved the following index:
- United Nations Development Programme Gender Development Index taken from Human Development Reports 2020. Note that we have downloaded the two tables of the Human Development Index for males and females, and used the ratio of the two as a GDI index, as described in the report.
