Department of Health Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom.
Department of Health Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom.
Soc Sci Med. 2020 Dec;266:113353. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113353. Epub 2020 Sep 10.
The worldwide obesity epidemic has impacted women more heavily than men. These gender-based differences are particularly pronounced in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region where gender obesity gaps on average exceed 10 percentage points. This paper examines one of the explanations, namely the role of female empowerment on gender gaps in obesity. We study the effect of several measures of female empowerment including female labor market participation on gender obesity gaps over a time span of 41 years (1975-2016) in a sample of 190 countries. We document that after controlling for a number relevant controls, gender obesity gaps are only associated to measures of female empowerment in the MENA region but that this is not true worldwide. We then use an instrumental variable approach in order to illustrate that the causality runs indeed from empowerment, proxy it by both labor market and political participation to gender obesity gaps and not vice versa. Our results reveal that a one percentage point increase in female labor market participation (female MPs in national parliament) predicts a 0.2 (0.09) percentage point decrease in gender gaps in obesity in the MENA region.
全球肥胖症流行对女性的影响甚于男性。在中东和北非（MENA）地区，这种基于性别的差异尤为明显，平均而言，性别肥胖差距超过 10 个百分点。本文探讨了其中一个解释，即女性赋权对肥胖性别差距的作用。我们研究了包括女性劳动力参与在内的几种女性赋权措施对 190 个国家/地区 41 年（1975-2016 年）期间性别肥胖差距的影响。我们记录到，在控制了一些相关的控制变量后，性别肥胖差距仅与 MENA 地区的女性赋权措施相关，但在全球范围内并非如此。然后，我们使用工具变量方法来说明因果关系确实是从赋权开始的，用劳动力市场和政治参与来代理性别肥胖差距，而不是相反。我们的结果表明，女性劳动力市场参与率（女性在国民议会中的议员比例）每增加 1%，MENA 地区的性别肥胖差距就会减少 0.2（0.09）个百分点。
