we first present the social institutions and gender index sigi as measure for social institutions iiil as well as our data and estimation model iii we start our empirical analysis by estimating the impact of the sigi and its five subindices on womens labour market participation iii to see whether social institutions generally affect womens activity patterns then to test our hypothesis that social discrimination against women leads to an overrepresentation of women in bad jobs and an underrepresentation of women in good jobs we estimate the impact of the sigi and its subindices on the gender segregation by sectors iii and on the gender segregation by working status iii the five components of the sigi ownership rights civil liberties son preference family code and physical integrity each measure one dimension of the underlying concept