The impact of female conservatism on labor force participation in Afghanistan

Abstract

In this paper, the Afghan women’s conservativeness effect has been investigated in their participation on the labor force using the secondary dataset of the Asia Foundation for 2015. Afghanistan is known as a radical traditional and religious country the foundation of that was mainly made in the 1980s and the 1990s as a result of two regimes of the Mujahideen and the Taliban. The study uses the linear probability model (LPM), probit, and logit models to look for evidence of the effect of conservatism in the country on the economic participation of Afghan women by introducing a conservatism index as a total sum to a number of socio- political participation of women out of the Asia Foundation questionnaire. These methods are used in order to achieve efficient and applicable results. In the findings of the paper, the coefficient for the variable conservatism did not appear as statistically significant but the findings have indicated that religiosity, being in the southern part of the country, belonging to a family with a monthly income of (5001-10000, 10001-15000, and 15001-20000 Afghani), has a statistically negative significance on the probability of a woman being in the labor force, keeping all other variables fixed. On the other hand, coming from other ethnicities of Afghanistan apart from Pashtuns, Uzbek, Tajik, and Hazara ethnicities, knowing Dari, and having a high school and university level of education has a statistically positive effect on a woman being in the labor market, ceteris paribus.