Oil, Islam, Women, and Geography: A Comment on Ross (2008)

Groh and Rothschild’s article is a response to Michael Ross’s article, “Oil, Islam, and Women,” where he developed a “gendered Dutch Disease theory, which points to oil wealth as a potential explanation for the slow progress towards gender equality in the Middle East” (Groh and Rothschild, 2012, p. 69). They re-examine his data (the two main regression tests that form the basis for his article), and argue that his data ill supports his conclusion and actually illustrates that Islam is a larger contributor to gender inequality.

“Our critique of his empirical evidence is two-fold… the significant coefficient on Oil Rents in Ross’s between regressions appear to be driven entirely by inter-regional differences omitted from his empirical analysis… Second, we argue that Ross’s time-series regressions are simply not well suited to test his hypothesis that oil perpetuates patriarchy: they exploit short-run intra-country variation to identify what is, at heart, a longer run inter-country mechanism” (p. 71).

“A closer analysis of Ross’s between data and regressions therefore lead us to reach a conclusion nearly opposite to his: we find little evidence that oil matter, per se, in driving female labor force participation and some mild evidence that Islam does” (p. 75).