A Cross-National Examination of Global Gender Inequality and Femicide by Intimate Partners and Family Members

Abstract

Using cross-national data, we analyze the effects of economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, legislating reserved seats for female political candidates, and prevalence of domestic violence victimization on lethal violence against women across 39 nations. These significant factors have been studied individually with little work on their comparative, unique effects on femicide. Our paper makes such a comparison. The dependent variable, femicide by intimate partners and family members, is constructed using data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the World Bank Group. All data are for the year 2011, a year that also corresponds to available data in the sources for our independent variables. These sources are the 2011 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report, the United Nations Statistics Division, International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Our resulting sample size is 39 countries from five regions of the world: Northern and Eastern Europe (n = 7), Southern and Western Europe (n = 11), Asia and Oceania (n = 7) Africa (n = 2), and the Americas (n = 12). The unit of analysis is nation and the total number of cases of femicide by intimate partners and family members from the nations is 2,067,450,894. Our study supports backlash theory and finds in nations where educational attainment and percent women reporting domestic violence are higher, and in nations having legislated quotas for female political participation, the incidents of femicide by intimate partner and family members increase. Counter to most previous research, we find no relationship between economic participation and opportunity or political empowerment and femicide by intimate partners and family members.