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A colonial legacy of African gender inequality? Evidence from Christian Kampala, 1895–2011
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 22:56 authored by Felix Meier zu Selhausen, Jacob WeisdorfThe colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. In this article, occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala are used to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We find that the arrival of Europeans in Uganda ignited a century-long transformation of Kampala involving a gender Kuznets curve. Men rapidly acquired literacy and quickly found their way into white-collar (high-status) employment in the wage economy built by the Europeans. Women took somewhat longer to obtain literacy and considerably longer to enter into white-collar and waged work. This led to increased gender inequality during the first half of the colonial period. However, gender inequality gradually declined during the latter half of the colonial era, and after Uganda's independence in 1962 its level was not significantly different from that of pre-colonial times. The data presented here also support Boserup's view that gender inequality was rooted in indigenous social norms: daughters of African men who worked in the traditional, informal economy were less well-educated, less frequently employed in formal work, and more often subjected to marital gender inequality than daughters of men employed in the modernized, formal economy created by the Europeans.
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Publication status
- Published
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- Published version
Journal
Economic History ReviewISSN
0013-0117Publisher
Blackwell PublishingExternal DOI
Issue
1Volume
69Page range
229-257Department affiliated with
- Economics Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2015-10-27First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2015-10-26Usage metrics
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