When Development Is Not Enough: Inequality, Structural Change, and Violence Against Women

Abstract

In most countries in most years, peacetime violence against women kills and maims more people than war. Since development reduces many forms of conflict, the persistence of gender violence worldwide, and especially in modernizing middle- income countries, is a puzzle. We therefore ask whether violence against women reflects unequal development and structural changes that generate gendered insecurity, in a manner outlined by feminist theorists. We hypothesize that gender- based violence will follow the patterns of other forms of social conflict-such as crime and political terror-linked to inequality, urban crowding, and poor governance. The Physical Security of Women Index from the WomanStats Database allows the first comprehensive cross-national test of the relationship between these variables and gendered insecurity. The PSOW captures the incidence, reporting barriers, and state response to rape, femicide, and domestic violence. We show that high levels of political terror are always accompanied by high physical insecurity of women. Then, using ordered logit regression on cross-sectional ordinal data, we examine the association between income inequality, urban crowding, corruption, and the physical insecurity of women, alongside modernization factors such as national income, religion, and female labor force participation. We find that cross-national variation in the physical insecurity of women is associated with inequality, dense urban growth, corruption, and political terror — but not religion — and that the effects of national income are highly conditioned by income inequality. Moreover, these effects operate differently at different levels of development, with stronger associations with inequality at higher levels of income, and diminishing returns to female labor force participation. Our study suggests that policy makers promoting economic and cultural modernization of gender roles should consider targeted policies to ameliorate inequality and improve governance and urban policy to protect women from increased risk of violence during development processes.