Nandi Female Husbands

Abstract

Gender differences in competitiveness have been hypothesized as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes. Central to the literature is whether differences in preferences for competition are innate or learned. I study this question in the Nandi society in Kenya. A distinct aspect of this society is the cultural institution of "female husbands." In Nandi custom, the property of a woman's house (the "house property") can only be transmitted to male heirs, and so inheritance flows through mothers to the sons. As not every woman gives birth to a male heir, the Nandi solution to sustain the family lineage is for the heirless woman to become the "female husband" to a younger woman. A woman who marries another woman for this purpose has to undergo an "inversion ceremony" to change into a man. This biological woman, now socially male, becomes a "husband" to a younger female and a "father" to the younger woman's children, whose sons become the heirs of her house. Taking advantage of this unique separation of biological and social roles holding constant the same society, I conduct competitiveness experiments. Similar to the extant evidence from experiments in Western cultures, I find that Nandi men opt to compete at roughly twice the rate as Nandi women. Importantly, however, female husbands (socially males but biologically females) choose to compete at basically the same rate as males, and thus around twice as often as females. These results provide novel support for the argument that social norms, family roles and endogenous preference formation are crucially linked to differences in competitiveness.