THE PATRIARCHY INDEX FOR ASIA: A PRAGMATIC TOOL FOR CROSS-CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF GENDER INEQUALITIES

Gender inequality remains a persistent barrier to development in many parts of Asia, yet thedomestic foundations of this inequality—particularly within family systems—are oftenneglected in global measurement tools. This study introduces the Patriarchy Index (PI), a newmetric constructed from census microdata to capture gendered power hierarchies in familiesacross 22 Asian and North African countries and 652 subnational administrative units.Of particular interest to development practitioners and scholars, the PI offers a scalable, lowcosttool for subnational diagnostics, especially where standard measures of gender equality aremissing or fail to reflect private-sphere constraints on women’s autonomy. Our study addresseswhether domestic arrangements—such as patterns of co-residence, marriage timing, and agebasedauthority—can reliably capture institutionalized patriarchy, and what regional variationthese patterns reveal.Using harmonized IPUMS-I census microdata and eleven theoretically grounded indicators, weconstruct a multidimensional composite index empirically validated through convergence withexisting gender measures, divergence from unrelated metrics, and correlation with gendereddevelopment outcomes. Our study finds that family-based patriarchy is spatially clustered andhighly variable at the subnational level. It further shows that higher PI values are significantlyassociated with reduced relative female labor force participation, even after controlling forstructural variables such as gross national income and urbanization.These results underscore the PI’s value as a complementary measure: it captures dimensions ofgender inequality that remain invisible to public-facing or outcome-based indicators and helpsbridge the gap between domestic constraints and broader patterns of disenfranchisement. Incontexts where legal reform and female empowerment are pursued without addressinghousehold-level structures, the PI offers a diagnostic that speaks directly to the architecture offamily systems—illuminating where and how deeper constraints on gender equality endure.