Session 7: Gender

We study whether gender differences in university major choices result from anticipated labor market discrimination. Using administrative transcript records from a large Midwestern university, we first document two novel facts: women are less likely to study science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as well as business and economics, but 1) those who do are positively selected on ability, and 2) obtain higher grades conditional on ability. Next, we show that these patterns are consistent with a signaling model in which women anticipate greater labor market discrimination in STEM, business, and economics than in other fields. We then use a novel student survey to: 1) provide direct empirical evidence for the model assumptions, lending furthercredence to anticipated discrimination being a driver of major choice, and 2) document striking patterns of anticipated discrimination by women, particularly in STEM, business, and economics, affecting both expected economic outcomes (such as wages) and expected workplace conditions. Finally, we show that anticipated discrimination explains women’s course-taking and major choices, but not men’s.

Gender gaps in promotion remain widespread and contribute to persistent career disparities between men and women. A key determinant of promotion outcomes is employees’ own desire for advancement—yet promotion intentions are likely shaped by the organizational context in which they work, with managers acting as both mediators and decision-makers in the promotion process. In this paper, we study the role of managers in shaping the gender gap in promotion intentions, using detailed personnel data from the second largest property insurance company in Japan and plausibly exogenous manager rotations.

More than one in four women worldwide have experienced intimate partner violence (IPV). To date, few interventions have proven effective at reducing IPV, and those that have all operated at the community level rather than targeting only households at risk. This paper seeks to establish whether community-wide treatment is a necessary component of prevention, and, if so, the channel through which engaging others promotes behavior change among those at risk. Models of social norms enforcement suggest a potential mechanism, but rigorous evidence is lacking. To test this idea, we experimentally evaluate the Peruvian government’s flagship prevention program. In treatment communities, households experiencing IPV were identified at baseline and offered 8–12 interactive sessions led by community health workers, combining prevention curricula with telenovela-style edutainment. In a randomly chosen half of communities, 30% of couples at low risk of violence were also invited to participate. Consistent with previous findings, the program substantially reduced IPV rates reported by at-risk women, with effects concentrated among those who participated. In addition, effects on at-risk women are significantly larger in communities that also delivered the program to low-risk households. We show that the expanded program achieves greater reductions in IPV by generating program effects among the at-risk households most difficult to reach: in villages that targeted only households at risk, IPV falls exclusively among program participants, while in villages that also engaged nonviolent households, IPV also falls among at-risk non-participants. Moreover, the benefits of the expanded program are observed even when delivered at home rather than in a group setting in which participants can observe one another and interact. Overall, these patterns indicate that engaging non-violent households activates community-level norms enforcement, providing novel evidence that social norms influence violence in the home and that collective norms activation is central to extending the reach and efficacy of IPV prevention efforts.

This paper investigates whether reporter identity shapes news content and, through it, reader behavior. Using the universe of murders with female victims in Italy from 2006 to 2022, I exploit the quasi-random assignment of journalists to crimes based on newsroom schedules to estimate gender differences in reporting. I construct novel NLP-based narrative indices, validated against human annotators, capturing two opposing reporting styles: victim-centered (VC) narratives, which contextualize the crime within the broader phenomenon of VAW, and perpetrator-centered (PC) narratives, which emphasize the perpetrator’s motives. Female journalists score one standard deviation higher on VC and are 17% more likely to label a murder a femicide and 70% more likely to mention victim resources; male journalists are 14% more likely to attribute the crime to jealousy or rage. These differences disappear for murders with male victims, ruling out quality-based explanations. Combining reporter assignment with provincial readership data in a staggered difference-in-differences design, I show that a 50 percentage point increase in exposure to female reporters leads to a 17% increase in calls to the national VAW helpline, roughly one additional call per province per week. The effect is driven by victim-centered narratives: experimental evidence shows that VC framing increases the perceived prevalence of help-seeking behavior, shifting norms around seeking support. By contrast, PC narratives increase empathy toward the victim and perpetrators, while generating higher click-through engagement among male readers, suggesting that identity-driven and audience-maximizing motives may reinforce each other. These findings show that newsroom diversity shapes not only who produces the news but the informational content of journalism itself, with direct consequences for readers’ real-world behavior.

Social movements that encourage reporting of wrongdoing may also induce unfounded accusations. We study how #MeToo—a social movement that encouraged reporting of sexual harassment—changed the strength of sexual harassment accusations and adjudicators’ willingness to believe them. We estimate that #MeToo increased the probability of winning a sexual harassment complaint by 10.1 pp. This increase can reflect stronger complaints filed (selection) or more favorable adjudicators (direct treatment). We develop a theoretical framework to disentangle these effects, and use complaints filed before but resolved after #MeToo to estimate the direct treatment effect. We find #MeToo caused adjudicators to be more favorable to complainants and that complaints induced by #MeToo were stronger. However, there was significant gender heterogeneity: women induced to report brought stronger complaints, while men induced to report brought weaker complaints. In other words, #MeToo encouraged reporting of unfounded accusations only by men.

This paper studies the effects of a 2017 Indian law that increased the duration of paid maternity leave from 12 to 26 weeks on the labor market outcomes of women and men: wages, employment, and career trajectories. Leveraging pre-reform variation in the duration of leave offered across employers (driven by parent company policies), and linking social security records covering the universe of formal workers in India with all LinkedIn profiles, we document four main findings. First, the policy reduced female employment by 6% within six months of implementation and by 10% within four years. These effects were concentrated among young women aged 18 to 35, with no impact on men or older women, indicating that the average firm shrank in response to higher costs. Second, employers did not pass costs onto wages: women’s wages remained unchanged while men’s wages rose slightly, consistent with firms seeking to retain experienced male employees as women became more expensive to employ. Third, men were promoted over women: incumbent male workers were more likely to move into managerial and abstract roles requiring higher firm-specific human capital, while young women were more likely to be placed in manual or routine positions. Fourth, to rationalize the magnitude of the employment decline, employers would have to greatly overestimate the rate at which women take maternity leave (implying employer misperceptions). Estimates indicate the mandate was benefit-cost neutral: it benefited employed women while raising costs for employers, with minimal impact on adverse selection at firms that already offered long leaves before the reform.

This paper provides evidence on the consequences of preventing an unplanned pregnancy—for the mother and for the next generation—using a contraceptive access shock in Chile. In September 2015, Chile eliminated the prescription requirement for emergency contraception, sharply increasing access in a context where abortion was completely banned. I combine individual-level administrative records on births, student outcomes, and pharmacy sales to exploit variation in pharmacy proximity, combined with the sharp temporal change in conceptions around the reform, to identify causal effects. The access shock reduced birth rates, especially among adolescents, and improved their educational out- comes. Children conceived after the shock have higher standardized GPA scores and attendance rates in elementary school than those conceived just before. The mechanism analysis shows that parental characteristics shift at the reform cutoff, indicating changes in the composition of who becomes a parent. However, within-family estimates across siblings conceived on either side of the reform remain positive, suggesting that birth planning itself—independent of selection into parenthood—improves children’s outcomes. These findings provide suggestive evidence that greater access to family planning generates intergenerational benefits by improving the conditions into which children are born.

How does removing barriers to entry for previously excluded groups affect the productivity of high-skill professions? This paper studies the entry of female physicians into the Russian Empire’s rural public healthcare system after the 1872 opening of the world’s first full-term medical school for women. I digitize and construct a novel district-level panel of medical labor force and vital statistics covering 330+ districts from 1876–1910 and exploit quasi-random timing of replacement hires in a staggered difference-in-differences design. I find that the first female physicians reduced infant mortality and young adult mortality of both sexes. Mortality declines among young men, a group whose care-seeking was unlikely to rise with female physician entry, indicate that early female physicians were more effective than the male physicians they replaced. This pattern is consistent with positive selection under high entry barriers, leading to rising overall physician quality in the long run. Female physicians also brought more women into formal care, as evidenced by their displacement of untrained midwives. To interpret these findings, I develop a conceptual framework distinguishing supply-side selection from demandside concordance preferences. I show that individual-level physician value-added differences by gender converged over time, consistent with long-run predictions. Ultimately, allowing women into medicine reduced mortality through higher-quality physicians and expansion of access.

We study how faculty promotion decisions shape women’s careers and the academic pipeline, using data from 4,000 Spanish university departments across all disciplines. We identify exogenous variation in promotions using the random assignment of evaluators to promotion committees between 2002 and 2008: applicants whose committees included a co-author or colleague were significantly more likely to qualify for promotion. We document two main findings. First, failing to obtain tenure has asymmetrically lasting consequences for women. Those who narrowly miss tenure are 57 percentage points less likely to be tenured fifteen years later, compared to 29 percentage points for men. Second, when women do obtain tenure, the effects extend well beyond their own careers: promoting a woman to Associate Professor increases female faculty by 1.5 members after 15 years, leads to six additional female PhD graduates over the following decade, and raises the number who subsequently remain in academia and reach tenured positions.

This paper examines how authority figures in higher education shape gender norms over the long run. We exploit the random assignment of first-year students to faculty advisors at an elite university in the Middle East and combine administrative records with an alumni survey measuring gender attitudes up to 24 years later. Women assigned to female advisors adopt more egalitarian views about politics and work, while men become more conservative. These effects are strongest among religious students and in male-dominated STEM fields, where female authority is especially counter-stereotypical. The effects may persist through reinforcement, as women assigned to female advisors later sort toward female instructors and more gender-themed courses. Our results do not appear to be driven by generic exposure to successful women. Instead, they point to a distinct role for authority in transmitting gender norms: randomized exposure to high-achieving female peers has little effect, while the largest impacts come from senior and high-value-added female advisors. A simple framework combining belief updating and identity-based status threat helps explain these patterns of female empowerment and male backlash. More broadly, our findings reveal a progress paradox whereby gains in female representation in elite authority expand opportunities for women while intensifying backlash among men, thereby deepening gender polarization.

We study whether workplace flexibility is a key driver of the child penalty. We exploit the sharp and heterogeneous diffusion of work-from-home (WFH) contracts after COVID-19 in a difference-in-differences framework. Our analysis combines administrative data on the universe of Italian WFH contracts with matched employer–employee records, administrative mother–father links, fertility records, and firm-level balance sheets. Greater exposure to flexible work arrangements substantially reduces mothers’ post-childbirth earnings losses, primarily through higher weeks worked, lower part-time incidence, lower take-up of parental leave, and improved career progression. The gains are larger among younger, lower-earning and commuting mothers, consistent with flexibility relaxing time and contractual constraints where they are most binding. IV estimates indicate that holding a WFH contract offsets a large share of the child penalty. While fathers’ own earnings do not respond to flexibility around childbirth, fathers’ exposure to flexible work reduces mothers’ earnings losses by a comparable magnitude. This pattern points to household-level time constraints—rather than mother-specific constraints—as a central mechanism for the child penalty, and suggests a more limited role for explanations based primarily on employer discrimination or gender norms. Consistent with this interpretation, fertility—a joint household decision—increases for mothers more exposed to flexibility, because flexibility lowers the labor market cost of the marginal child. A counterfactual exercise shows that the life-cycle widening of the gender earnings gap would have been 13% smaller under current WFH diffusion and up to 26% smaller if all remotable jobs had adopted flexible arrangements.

Remote work breaks the physical tie between workers and workplaces, allowing parents to combine childcare and work time. If child-related demands constrain parents’ work hours, remote work may relax those constraints. To understand the net effect of the opportunity to work remotely on parental earnings, we link firm remote-work policies to administrative tax records. We find that, on average, remote work has no impact on the relative earnings of mothers compared to non-mothers or fathers compared to non-fathers. For mothers, the effects of remote work on earnings follow a u-shape, with the largest negative effects for primary-school age children. To understand why remote work does not raise the relative earnings of parents, we study the childcare arrangements of households. Using newly available administrative tax records on childcare arrangements in the United States, we document that parental use of paid childcare has fallen by roughly 10 percent since remote work became widespread. Mothers employed at remote-work firms are significantly less likely to use paid childcare than comparable mothers employed at in-person firms. A decomposition shows that mothers’ access to remote work accounts for more than half of the aggregate decline in use of paid childcare, outweighing other observed factors such as fathers’ characteristics, universal pre-K expansions, grandparental caregiving, platform work, and childcare-sector supply conditions. Together, the findings suggest that while remote work has the potential to ease work-family constraints and has coincided with historically high maternal employment, it also encourages parents to substitute away from paid childcare, limiting gains in mothers’ earnings.

The entry of married women into the labor force and the rise in women’s relative wages are amongst the most notable economic developments of the twentieth century. The growth in these indicators was particularly pronounced in the 1970s and 1980s, but it stalled since the early 1990s, especially for college graduates. In this paper, we argue that the discontinued growth in female labor supply and wages since the 1990s is a consequence of growing inequality. Our hypothesis is that the growth in top incomes for men generated a negative income effect on the labor supply of their spouses, which reduced their participation and wages. We show that the slowdown in participation and wage growth was concentrated among women married to highly educated and high income husbands, whose earnings grew dramatically over this period. We then develop a model of household labor supply with returns to experience that qualitatively reproduces this effect. A calibrated version of the model can account for a large fraction of the decline relative to trend in married women’s participation in 1995-2005 particularly for college women. The model can also account for the rise in the gender wage gap for college graduates relative to trend in the same period.

Over the past five decades, the labor force participation rate of American men has declined significantly–from 80% in the 1970s to just around 68% today–and similar trends are observed across the developed world. During the same period, the fastest-growing occupations have been those traditionally considered “feminine,” such as nursing. Are these two trends connected? Do masculinity norms discourage men from entering the labor force by deterring them from pursuing jobs perceived as feminine? We document that male employment participation declined more following sectoral reallocation in more gender-traditional labor markets, as proxied by occupational segregation by gender. We then examine whether masculinity norms systematically distort men’s occupational choices away from income-maximization and estimate men’s willingness to pay (in terms of forgone earnings) to avoid occupations seen as feminine. Understanding the role of masculinity norms in shaping men’s labor market decisions is crucial for addressing the ongoing decline in male labor force participation.

Men globally out-earn women, reflecting not only market frictions but also intra-household social norms that shape earnings choices. We study how two such norms—the Male Breadwinner Norm (MBN), that men should earn more than their wives, and the Female Homemaker Norm (FHN), which we formally define as the belief that women should contribute more to household chores—affect couples’ labor and income decisions in Bangladesh. We develop a lab-in-the-field experiment in which husbands and wives make incentivized choices between paired job bundles varying in income, occupational prestige, and required household chores. These choices reveal each spouse’s willingness to pay (WTP) to comply with or violate each norm. We present pilot results from 20 couples, showing that both men and women forgo earnings to maintain the male-breadwinner and female-homemaker structure, and that prestige differences, not income alone, drive male-breadwinner compliance. The full study with 1,200 couples will provide the first experimental estimates of the behavioral costs of adhering to intra-household specialization norms.

How important are social norms in shaping women’s labor supply relative to neoclassical economic forces? The widely studied “breadwinner norm” holds that it is socially undesirable for married women to earn more than their husbands. We test this prediction using an experiment in India. We randomly vary wage offers for salaried jobs among married women. If the norm binds, labor supply should be discontinuous or flatten when women are offered wages above their husbands’ income. We find no evidence that women withdraw from the labor force when offered wages that exceed their husbands’ incomes and can reject negative discontinuities as small as 1.5 percentage points. Instead, labor supply is highly responsive to wages, consistent with standard economic models. These findings hold even in the most conservative households.