Social Norms and Teenage Smoking: The Dark Side of Gender Equality

Abstract

This paper is the first to provide evidence that cultural attitudes towards gender equality affect behaviors with potentially adverse health consequences, and that they do so differently for male and female teenagers.  We show that descending from more gender-equal societies makes girls relatively more prone to smoke than boys.  Using data from second-generation immigrant teenagers coming from 45 different countries of ancestry and living in Spain, we find that the higher the degree of gender equality in the country of ancestry, the higher the likelihood that immigrant girls smoke relative to boys, even after we control for parental, sibling, and peer smoking.  Importantly, we uncover similar patterns when analyzing other risky behaviors such as drinking or smoking marijuana. This reinforces the idea that more gender-equal social norms may come at an extra cost to women’s health, as they increasingly engage in risky behaviors (beyond smoking) traditionally more prevalent among men.

Biography

Anna Sanz-de-Galdeano is an Associate Professor at the University of Alicante and an Associate Researcher at the Centre for Studies in Health and Economics (CRES-UPF). She holds Ph.D. in Economics from the European University Institute.

Her primary research interest is in health, labor and development economics, with a particular focus on applied microeconometrics and impact evaluation. Her research has been published in journals such as American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Economic Policy and Journal of Health Economics among others.

http://annasanzdegaldeano.com/