Gender differences in labor market outcomes

Abstract

This dissertation studies how gender mediates labor market outcomes, broadly defined. The first chapter asks: do the jobs best suited to women’s talents offer the flexibility that they need? I document that temporal flexibility and social skill intensity are inversely correlated across occupations. Guided by an occupational choice model, I show evidence that this correlation generates a trade-off between women’s preference for flexible work hours and their comparative advantage in social tasks. As a consequence, women’s relative labor market returns to both flexibility and social skills are attenuated, which in turn widens the gender wage gap. Event-studies around first births -- a shock to women's relative demand for flexibility -- help confirm that gender gaps in inflexible jobs are driven by women's time constraints rather than other factors. The second chapter documents how social intensive environments may lead to systemic disadvantage for labor market minorities. In work environments where people interact, differences in communication styles could increase employment segregation and labor market disparities for minority groups. Building on this intuition, we develop a simple model where jobs vary in the intensity of social interaction, and productivity is increasing in both social skills and cultural similarity. We find evidence in line with the model's predictions. The third chapter asks: what caused the rapid rise in human capital accumulation in the early 20th century? I examine the role of the birth control movement, led by Margaret Sanger, which facilitated the rollout of over 600 birth control clinics across the United States. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, I find that children whose mothers gained access to birth control were more likely to attend school, more likely to be literate, and less likely to report working. These findings are consistent with a quantity-quality tradeoff, in which investments in education came at the high opportunity cost of forgone income via child labor.