Data and Code for: Misperceived Social Norms: Women Working Outside the Home in Saudi Arabia

Through the custom of guardianship, husbands typically have the final word on their wives’ labor supply decisions in Saudi Arabia. We provide incentivized evidence that the vast majority of young married men in Saudi Arabia privately support women working outside the home (WWOH) from a normative perspective, while they substantially underestimate the level of support for WWOH by other similar men – even men from their same social setting, such as their neighbors. We then show that randomly correcting these beliefs about others increases married men’s willingness to help their wives search for jobs, as measured by their costly sign-up for a job-matching service for their wives. Four months after the main intervention, the wives of men whose beliefs about acceptability of WWOH were corrected are more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job outside the home. In an additional recruitment experiment with a local company, randomly informing women about the actual level of support for WWOH leads them to switch from an at-home temporary enumerator job to a higher-paying, outside-the-home version of the job. Together, our evidence indicates a potentially important source of labor market frictions, where labor supply is distorted due to misperceived social norms.