Doctoral Dissertation Research: Everyday violence against women and the state's promotion of "universal breadwinning model"

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

Gender equality and economic development go hand in hand. A wealth of evidence shows that economic development has a powerful, transformative, and profoundly positive effect on the social, economic and political circumstances of women. And nowhere is this relationship more apparent than in Europe where the states consistently and systematically score highly across all indicators associated with gender equality. However, despite these advances in gender equality, recent survey research shows that Europe has high rates of violence against women, particularly by intimate partners. This project argues that this counterintuitive pattern of everyday violence against women corresponds to the implementation and promotion of specific family policies, such as paid parental leave, childcare services, and individual taxation. While these policies are designed to increase female economic independence, they also precipitate the unravelling of traditional gender roles, which then provokes a violent male backlash against their partners. By recognizing the role of the state and identifying which family policies catalyze or exacerbate everyday violence, this project will help policymakers formulate best practices for addressing violence against women and improve the status women in Europe and elsewhere. This project examines a previously overlooked topic in political science - the issue of everyday violence against women. While analyses of conflict and the welfare state have increasingly incorporated gender and addressed issues such as wartime sexual violence and occupational sex segregation, relatively little research has been devoted to the violence against women during times of civil peace. This project investigates this unheeded phenomenon and questions why so many highly developed and egalitarian states, particularly in Europe, continue to have such high incidences of violence against women. It argues that everyday forms of violence against women are fundamentally political and can be best explained by variation in a state's implementation and promotion of the "universal breadwinning model", which undermines traditional gender norms, decreases men's intrafamily bargaining power, and then provokes a violent backlash. To test the proposed theoretical framework, this project utilizes three interconnected empirical strategies to elucidate not only the sub-national and cross-national patterns of gendered violence in Europe but also the micro-level causal mechanisms. First, the project uses an original dataset on the universal breadwinning model combined with a nationally-representative, EU-wide victimization survey to quantitatively test the association between violence and family policy in Europe. This statistical analysis is then supplemented with comparative historical analysis tracing the emergence and implementation of the universal breadwinning model, and interview research with experts and female survivors of violence, which is crucial for establishing the link between family policies and the micro-mechanism of changing intrafamily dynamics and male violence. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.