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Women, War and Structural Change

Paper Session

Friday, Jan. 3, 2025 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (PST)

San Francisco Marriott Marquis, Foothill F
Hosted By: Association for Comparative Economic Studies
  • Chair: Guo Xu, University of California-Berkeley

The Ms. Allocation of Talent: Can Improvements in the Allocation of Talent Close the Innovation Gender Gap?

Petra Moser
,
New York University
Moritz Lubczyk
,
Berlin School of Economics

Abstract

This paper investigates whether changes in the allocation of talent can help to close the innovation gender gap. To examine this question, we link the biographies of more than 70,000 scientists with their patents. OLS decompositions indicate that gender differences in research focus are a main driver of the innovation gender gap: Women are less likely to invent because they are less likely to work in patent-intensive research fields. To identify the causal effects of gender differences in the allocation of talent across fields, we exploit an exogenous shock during WWII, when the scarcity of male scientists pulled female scientists into patent-intensive research fields in STEM. Difference-in-differences estimates indicate that the number of female scientists increased by 41 percent in fields with an additional 10-percent increase in the share of enlisted male scientists. Using variation in enlistments across fields as an instrument for female entry, we find that one additional woman becomes an inventor for every five women entering a field in the physical sciences. Had women worked in STEM fields at the same rate as men, 64% more American women born 1940-80 would have become inventors and the innovation gender gap would close roughly 80 years sooner.

The Political Economy of Women’s Suffrage and World War I

Madison Arnsbarger
,
Weber State University

Abstract

After nearly a century of activism, American women won suffrage rights within one month of WWI’s close with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Wartime mobilization drew thousands of women into traditionally male-dominated industries, altering society’s view on the suitability of women in the workplace and public sphere. This paper studies the effect of women’s labor force participation (LFP) during WWI on political support for the Nineteenth Amendment. I introduce newly-digitized data charting the allocation of women’s labor across war-related industries throughout WWI to show that a 3.65pp (1SD) increase in women’s LFP from 1910-20 was associated with a 14pp increase in the probability that a congressman supported the Nineteenth Amendment. I implement two identification strategies, difference-in-differences and shift-share instrumental variables, to verify the causality of this relationship. My findings imply that LFP and civic engagement are complements, and that market labor may offer means to widened political rights.

Public Service and the Transmission of Gender Norms

Abhay Aneja
,
University of California-Berkeley
Silvia Farina
,
University of California-Berkeley
Guo Xu
,
University of California-Berkeley

Abstract

This paper combines personnel records of the U.S. federal government with census data to study how shocks to the gender composition of a large organization can persistently shift gender norms. Exploiting city-by-department variation in the sudden expansion of female clerical employment driven by World War I, we find that daughters of civil servants exposed to female co-workers are more likely to work later in life, command higher income, and have fewer children. These intergenerational effects increase with the size of the city-level exposure to female government workers and are driven by daughters in their teenage years at the time of exposure. We also show that cities exposed to a larger increase in female federal workers saw persistently higher female labor force participation in the public sector, as well as modest contemporaneous increases in private sector labor force participation suggestive of spill-overs. Collectively, the results are consistent with both the vertical and horizontal transmission of gender norms and highlight how increasing gender representation within the public sector can have broader labor market implications.
JEL Classifications
  • J1 - Demographic Economics
  • N7 - Transport, Trade, Energy, Technology, and Other Services