WHY VEIL? RELIGIOUS HEADSCARVES AND THE PUBLIC ROLE OF WOMEN

Abstract

We show that new economic opportunities that compel women to abandon their domestic roles have driven the adoption of religious veiling. We measure the prevalence of veiling among young women across Indonesia’s districts for more than two decades by human coding around a quarter million photographs attached to Indonesia’s public high school yearbooks. We exploit exogenous variations generated by the interaction between international demand for Indonesia’s products and sectoral and gender composition of local industries to show that the relationship is causal. This study suggests that veiling represents an effort by young women to reconcile their desire to join formal labor markets and the prevailing social norms in society.