Regional gender regimes in the global South: An empirical approach

Abstract

This article extends Walby's model of gender regimes to the global South by constructing South-appropriate measures for her four institutional domains (economy, polity, civil society, and violence). I examine interactions of these operationalizations with gender inequality/women's well-being indicators in 112 countries in four regions: Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), Southeast and South Asia (SESA), and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Organizing the analysis by domain suggests potentially distinctive types of Southern gender regimes. Although I find similarities in some South-North institutions and inequality outcomes, the specifically global South indicators matter. Overall gender inequalities vary regionally, as do the domains where institutional characteristics are associated with larger inequalities. The LAC region appears to follow a liberal-democratic public gender regime, SESA relationships most resemble the mean values for the global South, but MENA and SSA have regionally distinctive and substantively opposite patterns among their institutional domains.