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...is the most real and most formative factor of life.
(Thorstein Veblen [1899] 1931, 324)
While a century ago, institutional economists like Thorstein Veblen recognized gender norms as important institutions in the economy, today this particular type of institution receives less attention in institutional analysis. At the same time, feminist economists have found the notion of an institution useful for the analysis of the relationships between gender and the economy. We will argue that the understanding of gender norms as institutions necessitates a distinction between institutions that have similar effects for everyone and institutions that have asymmetric effects, that is, systematically different effects on different groups. We will illustrate our argument with a case study on the livelihoods of Yoruba women in Nigeria. The case study will show how gender norms result in an asymmetric institutional setting for women and men, even when norms about women's labor force participation, individual control over income, and partners' contribution to the household budget are symmetric. The article will conclude that an understanding of some institutions as asymmetric will enable both institutional analysis and household analysis to include attention to power, ideology, and change more systematically.
The structure of the article is as follows. First, we discuss gender norms as institutions, and link Veblen's path-breaking work on patriarchal institutions to more recent feminist economic work. The next section elaborates the distinction between symmetric and asymmetric institutions, followed by a brief discussion of intersections of gender norms and ethnicity, culture, and class. Then we introduce our case study with primary data collected among poor Yoruba women in the city of Ibadan, Nigeria. The next two sections present our findings on economic norms and family norms among the Yoruba. This is followed by a section that analyzes the interaction between both types of norms. We end with a conclusion.
Gender Norms as Institutions
Whereas a century ago, Veblen recognized gender norms as exemplary for how historical and cultural patterns influence the economic process of provisioning, today, institutional economics seems to be less concerned with gendered institutions. Certainly, today, gender norms are recognized as influential institutions, but Veblen's deep concern with patriarchal institutions does not play a key role in institutional analysis anymore. Explicit concerns with gender norms seem to have become one specialized area among others. This was not so for Veblen, who did not merely analyze the role of patriarchal norms out of an exclusive interest in women's disadvantaged position, (1) but rather studied these norms in order to understand how power and ideology affect the economy. As Ann Jennings (1993, 113) has argued when referring to Veblen (1964): "Veblen's views of the 'Barbarian status of women' were linked to a larger opposition to social hierarchy rooted in invidious distinctions." This integrated attention to gender norms has led Veblen to various important insights, for example, on the role of the household in late nineteenth century United States, with middle class women expressing men's status through their (supposed) leisure. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, he notes that:
... the position of woman in any community is the most striking index of the level of culture attained by the community, and it might be added, by any given class in the community. This remark is perhaps truer as regards the stage of economic development than as regards development in any other respect. At the same time the position assigned to the woman in the accepted scheme of life, in any community or under any culture, is in a very great degree an expression of traditions which have been shaped by the circumstances of an earlier phase of development, and which have been but partially adapted to the existing economic circumstances, or to the existing exigencies of temperament and habits of mind by which the women living under this modern economic situation are actuated. (Veblen 1931, 353)
Today, institutional economists who are concerned about gender norms plea for a more systematic, Veblenian, attention to gender in institutional economics. The reasons for such a plea partly emerge from insights provided by feminist economics. Jennings (1993), for example, has argued that institutionalism could build on the feminist critique of Western Cartesian dualisms such as public/private, economy/ family, mind/body, rational/emotional, and competitive/nurturant. She has shown that these categories are not neutral but imbued with symbolic gender meanings, referring to stereotypical characterizations of femininity and masculinity. The genderedness of dualisms underlying much of mainstream economic thought of rationality, households, and the division of labor, is key to the understanding of the various levels at which institutions operate, she argues. At the same time, however, we should be aware about their cultural specificity and not assume that they are the same across cultures, as this paper will illustrate. In particular, as Sandra Harding (1986, 167-79) has claimed, African worldviews do not neatly fit the portrayal of Cartesian dualisms. We should be very careful with universalizing categories such as "the African woman" (Olson 1994, 88-89) or polygamy (Hale 1995), as they conceal intersections with class and ethnicity as well as other social differentiations. From such cultural awareness, Anne Mayhew (1999) has emphasized the shared understanding in feminist and institutional economics of the cultural specific and social construction of economic reality. She notes that in both schools of thought power is recognized as a central force in the economy and that therefore the power of gender norms would make a logical part of institutional analysis. William Dugger (1996) has brought the various power relations together in the recognition of "four modes of inequality" (race, gender, class and nation) each of which supported by institutional arrangements making use of myths. In yet another contribution on similarities between institutional and feminist economics, Charles Whalen and Linda Whalen (1994) conclude that both approaches represent a holistic ontology, a pragmatic epistemology, and a comprehensive view of values. Finally, William Waller, in an article with Jennings (1990) warns us that institutionalists may run the risk of slipping back into the Cartesian dualisms dominating mainstream economics. Waller and Jennings alert us to the influence of culture on our knowledge creation, which may blind our view on certain issues, such as gender. It is therefore that they advise us to "... look at the cultural process of inquiry as outsiders to better see the prejudices embedded within it, and employ a method similar to the one that Thorstein Veblen applied to his inquiry into modern industrial economies" (Waller and Jennings 1990, 618).
We follow Dugger (1996), as well as many others, who have characterized patriarchy as a system of gender inequality. This system is supported by institutions that are gendered and therefore working out asymmetrically for men and women. The next section elaborates the notion of asymmetric institutions and argues in what ways gender norms differ from symmetric institutions. The following section links gender norms to the household, acknowledging that within households, gender norms interact with other social norms, in particular norms about culture, ethnicity and class.
Symmetric and Asymmetric Institutions
Not all institutions are asymmetric, of course--if they were, there would be no need to distinguish them from symmetric institutions. Many institutions are symmetric, that is, having similar effects on different social groups. Examples are driving on the left or right side of the road, universal primary education, exchange rates, or language (although even these may be affected to some extent by social differentiations). Hence, the distinction between symmetric and asymmetric institutions requires clarification. The sociological account of institutions by Patricia Yancey Martin (2004) may be helpful, since she has provided a detailed characterization of institutions, combining a wide variety of views in sociology from Parsons to Giddens. One of the strengths of sociological thinking about institutions is the recognition of asymmetries at the level of structures, identity, and symbolic meanings. Martin (2004, 1256-8) discusses five features of institutions that refer to asymmetries, which are, we think, relevant for institutional economics. These are features of institutions that:
* both constrain and facilitate behavior by group members
* are characterized by particular expectations, rules, and procedures
* are internalized by group members as identities
* have a legitimating ideology, and
* are organized in accord with and permeated by power.
Below, we briefly discuss these features, with reference to gender norms, elaborating Martin's own connections of each of these with gender. (2)
"Constrain and facilitate behavior by group members."
Gender-based constraints and facilitations are created by what Nancy Folbre (1994) has referred to as gendered structures of constraint. Such structures constrain as well as define people's behavior in the following sense: "Citizens can do X, non-citizens cannot. Men can do Y, women cannot" (Folbre 1994, 40). But gender norms are also challenged, evaded, bended, and negotiated by women, leading to a process of institutional change. Indeed, as she explains, "groups organized along lines of gender and age make particularly conspicuous efforts to reinforce the...
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