It's Raining Men! Hallelujah?

That is the title of this paper by Pauline Grosjean & Rose Khattar. The abstract:

We document the implications of missing women in the short and long run. We exploit a natural historical experiment, which sent large numbers of male convicts and far fewer female convicts to Australia in the 18th and 19th century. In areas with higher gender imbalance, women historically married more, worked less, and were less likely to occupy high-rank occupations. Today, people living in those areas have more conservative attitudes towards women working and women are still less likely to have high-ranking occupations. We document the role of vertical cultural transmission and of homogamy in the marriage market in sustaining cultural persistence. Conservative gender norms may have been beneficial historically, but are no longer necessarily so. Historical gender imbalance is associated with an aggregate income loss estimated at $800 per year, per person. Our results are robust to a wide array of geographic, historical and present-day controls, including migration and state fixed effects, and to instrumenting the overall sex ratio by the sex ratio among convicts.

Testosterone and labor market earnings

Testosterone, which induces sexual differentiation of the male fetus, is believed to transfer from males to their littermates in placental mammals. Among humans, individuals with a male twin have been found to exhibit greater masculinization of sexually dimorphic attributes relative to those with a female twin. We therefore regard twinning as a plausible natural experiment to test the link between prenatal exposure to testosterone and labor market earnings. For men, the results suggest positive returns to testosterone exposure. For women, however, the results indicate that prenatal testosterone does not generate higher earnings and may even be associated with modest declines.

From a paper by Anne C. Gielen, Jessica Holmes, & Caitlin Myers. 

HT: Clarence Nkengne Tsimpo

Bridging Education Gender Gaps in Developing Countries: The Role of Female Teachers

An interesting study by Karthik Muralidharan and Ketki Sheth 

Recruiting female teachers is frequently suggested as a policy option for improving girls' education outcomes in developing countries, but there is surprisingly little evidence on the effectiveness of such a policy. We study gender gaps in learning outcomes, and the effectiveness of female teachers in reducing these gaps using a large, representative, annual panel data set on learning outcomes in rural public schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. We report six main results in this paper. (1) We find a small but significant negative trend in girls' test scores in both math (0.02␣/year) and language (0.01␣/year) as they progress through the public primary school system; (2) Using five years of panel data, school-grade and student gender by grade fixed effects, we find that both male and female teachers are more effective at teaching students of their own gender; (3) However, female teachers are more effective overall, resulting in girls' test scores improving by an additional 0.036␣ in years when they are taught by a female teacher, with no adverse effects on boys when they are taught by female teachers; (4) The overall gains from having a female teacher are mainly attributable to their greater effectiveness at improving math test scores than male teachers (especially for girls); (5) We find no effect of having a same-gender teacher on student attendance, suggesting that the mechanism for the impact on learning outcomes is not on the extensive margin of increased school participation, but on the intensive margin of more effective classroom interactions; (6) Finally, the increasing probability of having a male teacher in higher grades can account for around 10-20% of the negative trend we find in girls' test scores as they move to higher grades.

Gender Wage Gap (EU Countries)

From Zizza (2013).

Relative Income within Households

Within couples, if the wife's potential income (based on her demographics) is likely to exceed the husband's, the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work. Couples where the wife earns more than the husband are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. Finally, based on time use surveys, the gender gap in non-market work is larger if the wife earns more than the husband.

Source.  

Support for democracy by gender (20 S-S African countries)

Source.

The authors, García-Peñalosa & Konte (March 2013), conclude:

An alternative hypothesis is that women’s lower support for democracy comes from the fact that democratic transitions are often associated with civil conflict. If women have a higher cost of conflict than men, then they are less likely to support democracy. Our analysis seems to point in this direction.

HT: Eugene Beaulieu. 

What determines gender political quotas?

According to this article by Gay, Santacreu-Vasut, & Shoham the main determinant is female/male distinction in language:

The abstract:

This article studies the determinants of gender political quota and enforcement sanctions, two key policy instruments for increasing female participation in politics. We find a novel empirical fact: language (the pervasiveness of gender distinctions in grammar) is the most significant related variable to quota adoption, more than traditional explanations such as economic development, political system and religion.

A draft is here.  

Shopping time!

Number of shopping trips per week for household maintenance

The graph is from the new paper "Who Does the Shopping? – German Timeuse Evidence, 1996–2009" by Procher & Vance (January 2013).
The abstract:

The labor force participation rate of women and men is converging in industrialized countries, but disparities nevertheless remain with respect to unpaid activities. Shopping for household maintenance, in particular, is a time-consuming, out-of-home activity that continues to be undertaken primarily by women, irrespective of their employment status. The present study employs panel methods to analyze, descriptively and econometrically, gender disparities in shopping behavior among couples using data from the German Mobility Panel (MOP) for 1996 to 2009. While women still shop more than men, we find evidence that the differential has narrowed in recent years, particularly among couples with children. Several individual and household characteristics are found to be significant determinants of shopping behavior, whereby employment status and children emerge as the most important single factors. In addition, the possession of a driver’s license coupled with unrestricted car availability increase each partner’s time in shopping. 

On the origins of gender roles

. . . [T]he descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture, today have less equal gender norms, measured using reported gender-role attitudes and female participation in the workplace, politics and entrepreneurial activities. To test for the importance of culture, we examine second-generation immigrants living within Europe and the United States. We find that even among individuals born and raised in the same country, those with a heritage of traditional plough use exhibit less equal beliefs about gender roles today.

Source: a working paper by Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn (March 1012).  

Gender gaps in earnings

This paper documents and studies the gender gap in performance among associate lawyers in the United States. Unlike most high-skilled professions, the legal profession has widely-used objective methods to measure and reward lawyers’ productivity: the number of hours billed to clients and the amount of new-client revenue generated. We find clear evidence of a gender gap in annual performance with respect to both measures. Male lawyers bill ten-percent more hours and bring in more than double the new-client revenue. We show that the differential impact across genders in the presence of young children and the differences in aspirations to become a law-firm partner account for a large part of the difference in performance.

That is from the new paper "Gender Gaps in Performance: Evidence from Young Lawyers" by Azmat and Ferrer (March 2012). 
A graph from the paper:

Why mothers breastfeed less girls than boys? Evidence from India.

This is from this paper in the latest number in the QJE.  

Breastfeeding is negatively correlated with future fertility because nursing temporarily reduces fecundity and because mothers usually wean on becoming pregnant again. We model breastfeeding under son-biased fertility preferences and show that breastfeeding duration increases with birth order, especially near target family size; is lowest for daughters and children without older brothers because their parents try again for a son; and exhibits the largest gender gap near target family size, when gender is most predictive of subsequent fertility. Data from India confirm each prediction. Moreover, child survival exhibits similar patterns, especially in settings where the alternatives to breastmilk are unsanitary.

Does breastfeeding inhibits fertility? 

. . . [N]ursing affects certain hormones that regulate ovulation. Breastfeeding appears to interrupt the release of the gonadotropin-releasing hormone, which triggers the pituitary gland to release high levels of luteinizing hormone (LH). This so-called LH surge marks the beginning of ovulation. There is also some evidence that breast- feeding increases levels of the hormone prolactin, which inhibits ovulation (Blackburn 2007).

. . . [N]ursing diverts calories from the mother to the infant. For mothers who consume a limited number of calories, this diversion can lead to malnutrition, which shuts down ovu- lation. This channel likely plays an important role in developing countries. 

Some results:

There appears to be a strong positive correlation between breastfeeding and birth order, consistent with the model’s prediction. As the average mother has about four children, the last child would be breastfed about 0.6 months longer than his oldest sibling. Similarly, children born once their mother has reached her ideal family size are breastfed 0.4 month longer than older siblings.

Yet another reason for the gender gap. Very interesting paper!!!