Women's liberation: What's in it for men?

Just to stay on a similar subject to the post I posted last week, I came across today a very interesting NBER paper by Matthias Doepke and Michèle Tertilt on "Women's liberation: What's in it for men?". Basically they argue that it was actually men who voted in favour for women's rights. So, if that was the case, why did men do that!?!

Here's an excerpt from their innovative paper:

"...from a man’s perspective, there is a tradeoff between the rights of his own wife versus the rights of other men’s wives. Improvements in married women’s legal rights increase women’s bargaining power relative to their husbands within the household. Since husbands have nothing to gain from an increase in their wives’ bargaining power at their own expense, men ideally want their own wives to have no rights. But men might stand to gain from other women having rights.

We focus on two channels that give men a stake in the rights of other men’s wives. First, men are altruistic towards their own children, half of which are daughters. Men prefer their daughters to have a strong bargaining position vis-`a-vis their sons-in-law...

Second, in our model an improved bargaining position for wives translates, among other things, into increased investments in children’s human capital. A father prefers his children to find high-quality mates, and therefore stands to gain from increasing the power of his children’s future mothers-in-law.

We argue that this tradeoff between the rights of a man’s own wife versus those of other men’s wives has shifted over time, because of a changing role of human capital. When the return to education increases, finding well-educated spouses for one’s children becomes a more important concern. Similarly, a rising return to education also increases fathers’ concern about the rights of their daughters, because the daughter’s marital bargaining power matters for the grandchildren’s education. According to our theory, the ultimate cause of the expansion of women’s was technological change that increased the demand for human capital. This change elevated the importance of children’s education, it increased men’s incentives to expand women’s bargaining power, and it ultimately induced men to voluntarily extend rights to
women rights."

Clever sausages!!!