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The current research attempts to identify publication trends, prominent authors, top journals, most frequently occurring keywords, top organizations and highly cited research articles, as well as distinctive themes in the context of women’s financial literacy, using VOSviewer and Biblioshiny. A total of 304 documents on women’s financial literacy were extracted from the Scopus database, covering the period from 1986 to 2023. Further content analysis is used to identify the predominant themes, such as gender and financial literacy, dimensions of financial literacy, financial inclusion and retirement planning. The results discovered that Sabri MF is the most prolific author; the Journal of Consumer Affairs is the top journal; the most frequently used keyword is ‘financial literacy’; Europe, America and Asia have the highest region-wise contribution; Universiti Putra Malaysia has the most publications; and Lusardi, Mitchell, and Curto (2010, Journal of Consumer Affairs, 44(2), 358–380) is the most cited document. There has been a plethora of research focused on general financial literacy, as well as relating financial literacy and retirement planning. This study is limited to a bibliometric analysis of literature on women’s financial literacy over the past 37 years. JEL Codes: G53, J26, D14, G11, G51

The research assesses the challenges deterring the progress of women’s small-scale businesses in Rwanda. It was guided by the following specific objectives: identify challenges faced by women’s small-scale businesses in Rwanda and assess how those challenges affect women’s small-scale businesses' progress. Findings were collected from 109 respondents who have been running small-scale businesses over a period ranging from one to three years. Results were collected through a questionnaire and desk review and quantitatively analyzed. The findings shed light on the challenges which small-scale women entrepreneurs face namely family expenses (53.2%), drunkenness (67%), family conflicts (93.6%), financial illiteracy (100%), and poverty (100%). The above-mentioned challenges affect small-scale businesses in that women entrepreneurs find themselves mixing up businesses and family expenses. Family conflicts were also highlighted to be another cause of business failure in that women who conflict with their husbands cannot easily prosper in their businesses. In addition, financial illiteracy makes them unable to assess their profit and find their businesses stagnant or closing. Thus, there is a need to provide support to small-scale businesswomen about how to assess business progress, and calculate their interest rate so that they may come up with financial skills. This would enable them to align their daily family expenses with their business interest. Once properly implemented, it would decrease the business failure rate.

We show that the vast majority of young married men in Saudi Arabia privately support women working outside the home (WWOH) and substantially underestimate support by other similar men. Correcting these beliefs increases men’s (costly) willingness to help their wives search for jobs. Months later, wives of men whose beliefs were corrected are more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job outside the home. In a recruitment experiment with a local company, randomly informing women about actual support for WWOH leads them to switch from an at-home temporary enumerator job to a higher-paying, outside-the-home version of the job.

Considerable research has examined human mate preferences across cultures, finding universal sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources as well as sources of systematic cultural variation. Two competing perspectives—an evolutionary psychological perspective and a biosocial role perspective—offer alternative explanations for these findings. However, the original data on which each perspective relies are decades old, and the literature is fraught with conflicting methods, analyses, results, and conclusions. Using a new 45-country sample (N = 14,399), we attempted to replicate classic studies and test both the evolutionary and biosocial role perspectives. Support for universal sex differences in preferences remains robust: Men, more than women, prefer attractive, young mates, and women, more than men, prefer older mates with financial prospects. Cross-culturally, both sexes have mates closer to their own ages as gender equality increases. Beyond age of partner, neither pathogen prevalence nor gender equality robustly predicted sex differences or preferences across countries.

Can increasing control over earnings incentivize a woman to work, and thereby influence norms around gender roles? We randomly varied whether rural Indian women received bank accounts, training in account use, and direct deposit of public sector wages into their own (versus husbands’) accounts. Relative to the accounts only group, women who also received direct deposit and training worked more in public and private sector jobs. The private sector result suggests gender norms initially constrained female employment. Three years later, direct deposit and training broadly liberalized women’s own work-related norms, and shifted perceptions of community norms.

We conducted a field experiment aimed at increasing the percentage of women majoring in economics. We exposed students enrolled in introductory classes to successful and charismatic women who majored in economics at the same university. The intervention significantly impacted female students’ enrollment in further economics classes, increasing their likelihood to major in economics by 8 percentage points. This is a large effect, given that only 9 percent of women were majoring in economics at baseline. Since the impacted women were previously planning to major in lower-earning fields, our low-cost intervention may have a positive effect on their future incomes.

Widowhood in Africa presents unique challenges for women due to cultural and social factors. This paper discusses the challenges of widowhood in African contexts with a view that various social, cultural, legal, financial, and economic issues are at the centre of the challenges widows face in Africa. A thematic literature review was used to examine the multifaceted challenges faced by widows in African societies. Findings show that widows in Africa face multiple challenges, including limited healthcare access, property rights, social support, and harmful traditional practices, impacting their well-being across various dimensions. Cultural attitudes, legal barriers, resource constraints, limited awareness, and the complex interplay of these factors hinder effective interventions. The literature review also found that changing cultural norms, improving access to education and economic opportunities, and strengthening social protection systems are crucial steps towards creating a more inclusive and equitable society for widows. The paper concludes that comprehensive and coordinated strategies are necessary to address these multifaceted challenges, including legal reforms, economic empowerment, awareness campaigns, and the provision of essential resources. Further, collaborative implementation of these strategies can promote gender equality, reduce poverty, and enhance the lives of widows in African countries. Further, there is a need for the urgency of comprehensive interventions and support systems to alleviate the hardships faced by widows in African societies.

This article discusses cultural barriers to women’s participation and success in the labor market in developing countries. I begin by discussing the relationship between economic development and female employment and argue that cultural norms help explain the large differences in female employment among countries at the same level of development. I then examine several gender-related social norms that constrain women’s employment and present examples of policies aimed at overcoming these barriers. Some of the policies are designed to work around a norm, helping women to be more successful in the labor market despite it, while others attempt to change the norms. There is evidence that both approaches can be effective in increasing women’s labor market participation and earnings. Policy-making that is attuned to cultural norms is a promising avenue for narrowing gender gaps in the labor market.

The question of whether females tend to act more ethically or risk-averse compared to males is an interesting ethical puzzle. Using a large sample of US firms over the 1992-2014 period, we investigate the effect that the gender of a chief executive officer (CEO) has on earnings management using classification shifting. We find that the pre-Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act period was characterized by high levels of classification shifting by both female and male CEOs, but the magnitude of such practices is, surprisingly, significantly higher in firms with female CEOs than in those with male CEOs. By contrast, our results suggest that following the passage of the punitive SOX Act, classification shifting by female CEOs declined significantly, whilst it remained pervasive in firms with male CEOs. This suggests that the observable differences in financial reporting behavior between male and female CEOs seem to be because female CEOs are more risk-averse, but not necessarily more ethically sensitive than their male counterparts are. The central tenets of our findings remain unchanged after several additional checks, including controlling for alternative earnings management techniques, corporate governance mechanisms, CEO and chief financial officer characteristics and propensity score-matching.