Petroleum or Patriarchy? A Statistical Analysis of Female Economic and Political Participation in Angola and Norway

Abstract

This paper investigates whether women in oil-rich countries are adversely affected by their country’s natural resource wealth through the channels of female labor force participation and female political influence. Using both cross-national (between 1991 and 2014) and local-level estimations (2017) within Angola and Norway, I assess whether increased oil wealth is linked with decreases in female employment, female voter turnout and the share of national parliament seats held by women. This paper contributes to existing research on the gendered natural resource curse in three ways: (1) by utilizing a regression model that accounts for both structural and cultural explanations, (2) by conducting an in-depth, historical analysis on the development of female economic and political participation in Angola and Norway respectively and (3) by assessing the plausibility of Michael Ross’ theory in the context of oil-rich, non-Muslim majority countries. I find that in my cross-national estimation, oil wealth, as measured by oil income per capita and the percentage of the national labor force employed in industrial sector, does not have a statistically significant effect on measures of female economic and political participation. However, at the local-level, I find that oil wealth does have a statistically significant effect on female economic participation, where female residents of Norwegian municipalities that were in close proximity of an onshore, oil processing facility were less likely to work outside of the household than female residents of municipalities not in close proximity to a processing facility.