Gender Discrimination and Social Identity: Evidence from Urban Pakistan

This paper investigates how gender discrimination depends on the social identities of interacting parties. We use data from economic decision-making experiments to identify gender discrimination and randomly matched 2,836 male and female students pursuing bachelors-equivalent degrees in three different types of institutions that represent distinct identities within the Pakistani society. Our main finding is that gender discrimination is not uniform in intensity and nature across educated Pakistani society and varies as a function of the social identity of both individuals who interact. While we find no evidence of higher socio-economic status men discriminating against women, men of lower socio-economic status and higher religiosity tend to discriminate against women ?but only women from lower socio-economic status who are closest to them in social distance. Moreover, this discrimination seems to be largely taste-based.