Cash Transfers (empowerment and nutrition)

The chart shows some puzzling results. It is from this paper by Mara van den Bold, Agnes R. Quisumbing, & Stuart Gillespie.

Women, Patience, and Economic Development

From a paper by Michal Bauer & Julie Chytilová. A draft is here. 
Abstract

Researchers have observed that women in developing countries often make more development friendly choices than men. We implemented experimental tasks among a large and diverse sample of married individuals in rural India and found women to make on average more patient and more risk-averse choices than men. We find important heterogeneity in gender differences in patience: there is no difference for spouses with no children but patience levels diverge if there are small children in a family. The findings imply that conflicting spousal preferences are most likely in poor families with children.

From the conclusions

We found women to make more patient choices than men on average. Most interestingly, we found increasingly patient choices among women who had higher number of children below 18 years of age, with the highest level of patience being associated with three to four children. We observe important differences in this link, depending on the age of the children. Women’s patience is correlated only with children who are younger than 18 years old ― and hence those she has to look after ― but not with children that are already adults. We do not find a link between children and men’s patience. Thus, a higher number of children also predicts the significantly higher patience of women compared to men. The relationships hold also after controlling for education, wealth and other personal characteristics, village fixed effects, and are robust to alternative estimation techniques.

May be a reason why women are the main participants in ROSCAs and beneficiaries of micro-lending.  

Women’s Bargaining Power and Child Nutrition (Senegal)

While standard OLS estimates suggest that if a mother has more bargaining power, her children will have a better nutritional status, our IV estimates indicate that the true impact is underestimated if the endogeneity of bargaining power is not taken into account.

Source. 

Why Don't Women Patent?

The graph is from a new working paper by Hunt et al (September 2012). The data is from the US and the authors explain (p. 15):

The most important determinants of the gender patenting rate gap among S&E  [Science & Engineering] degree holders are women’s underrepresentation in patent–intensive fields of study, especially electrical and mechanical engineering, and in patent–intensive job tasks, especially development and design. Women’s lower share of doctoral degrees plays a minor role.

And:

Hunt (2010) demonstrated that women trained as engineers disproportionately leave engineering jobs due to dissatisfaction with pay and promotion (p. 16). 

[I wonder if there is more to this story, such as having children affecting more women then men; but again, we see a large increase in female labor participation in recent years].  

Worked Hours (Ref. Married Women)

Relying on three micro data sets, we document average hours worked of different demographic subgroups for a sample of eighteen European countries and the US over the period 2001 to 2008. We find that hours worked vary significantly across countries, and the largest variations can be found for married women: while US married women work 1250 hours annually, Italian married women only work 720 hours, i.e. barely 58 percent of their American counterparts.

That is from Bick and Fuchs-Schündeln (August 2012). 

The authors add:

. . . [T]axes and wages can account for three quarters of the large hours difference between the Western European countries and the US.

HT: Clarence Tsimpo.

The pill

Decades of research on the U.S. gender gap in wages describes its correlates, but little is known about why women changed their career paths in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper explores the role of “the Pill” in altering women’s human capital investments and its ultimate implications for life-cycle wages. Using state-by-birth-cohort variation in legal access, we show that younger access to the Pill conferred an 8- percent hourly wage premium by age fifty. Our estimates imply that the Pill can account for 10 percent of the convergence the gender gap in the 1980s and 30 percent in the 1990s.

That is the abstract of the paper "The Opt-In Revolution? Contraception and the Gender Gap in Wages" by Bailey, Hershbein, and Miller (December 2011).