Cultural Background, Norms and Customs: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

Insistence on female virginity in sub-Saharan Africa is influenced by ancestral norms, and this thesis aims to explore how these norms continue to have a strong influence on different aspects of women's lives. This research is intended to enrich the academic gaps on this specific topic. Few empirical studies are conducted in this geographical area, which examine various cultural and historical phonemena such as family planning and ethnic heritage and pastoralism. The study combines historical data from the Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock, 1967) with contemporary individual-level information from the Demographic and Health Surveys. The empirical analysis explores the findings in four domains of women's lives: female sexual behavior, contraception, female empowerment, and fertility. The regression models include a wide set of controls, such as country fixed effects as well as geographical and historical variables, and the results are validated through robustness checks involving heterogeneity analyses by age, marital status and intermarriage. The results reveal that insistence on virginity is significantly associated with more conservative sexual behaviors, lower use and awareness of contraceptive methods, and lower indicators of female empowerment, such as having a paid job or a high level of education. The association with fertility is overall non-significant, not suggesting any particular insights. Furthermore, a section is dedicated to the relationships between insistence on virginity and the practices of pastoralism and missions, although their investigation does not alter our results. Overall, the thesis provides evidence of cultural persistence and its implications for gender equity in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa societies.