Gender norms and labor supply changes

The relocation decisions of male-female couples are predominantly determined by what's best for the man's career: 1. Couples are more likely to relocate when a man is laid off than after a woman is. 2. Men's earnings increase following a couple's move to a new commuting zone, while women's earnings stay the same or decline. This in part because women spend less time working, particularly in the first year after the move when they are more likely than men to be job hunting. The gender gap persists for at least five years and is largest among couples who are in their 20s. The researchers study Germany and Sweden, and attribute the results to relocation decisions being driven by antiquated gender norms. They conclude that "households in both countries place less weight on income earned by a woman compared to a man, particularly in Germany." By Seema Jayachandran, Lea Nassal, Matthew J. Notowidigdo, Marie Paul, Heather Sarsons, and Elin Sundberg. https://lnkd.in/eHSXi5Mj

Did you know Australian women just set a record?🏅 Women's labour force participation rate reached a new high of 63.5% in January 2025. That's a half-percentage-point jump from the previous month. Which is big in labour statistics land. It's this rise in women's labour force participation that drove the overall increase in the national rate (as men's participation rate fell slightly). Proof why it's important to always add a gender lens. January is the month where many new jobseekers and new hires are joining the labour market. As well as mothers who have been juggling summer holiday demands, and whose children will now be starting childcare or school, changing their working availability and preferences. Some will still be in the process of looking for opportunities and yet to be matched to a suitable job. This start-of-year job searching can help explain why the unemployment rate ticked up very slightly to 4.1% (again it was women's unemployment rate that drove the overall change, as men's rate was unchanged). Also today we found out Australia's latest gender pay gap, reported for November 2024. Men are earning on average $2073 in full-time weekly wages, compared to $1826 for women. That's a gap of $247 a week, tallying to around $12,800 a year. It equates to women earning 11.9% less than men on average, a gap which has widened since the last calculation (11.5% in May 2024). Men's earnings surged more rapidly than women's during this six-month period, particularly in sectors such as the Real Estate where jobs growth is strong. And partly the gender earnings gap reflects compositional changes. For example, between May and Nov 2024, we saw a notable expansion in women's employment in the Preschool and School Education sector. But because that's not a high-paying sector, it can dampen the calculation of women's overall average earnings. The Australian Government's legislated pay rise for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers came into effect in Dec 2024, so will be reflected in the next gender pay gap calculation. These numbers come fresh from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Labour Force and Average Weekly Earnings datasets released yesterday. The takeaway from these numbers is that women's opportunities to join and stay in the paid workforce – and gain economic independence – continue to grow. Government policies, company initiatives, working-from-home and hybrid work, as well as the financial necessity of cost of living pressures, are all likely factors contributing to this record-breaking rise in women's workforce participation. But, we still need sustained and strengthened efforts to undo patterns of gender concentration, rectify the undervaluation of female-concentrated sectors, and unravel the biases and barriers that still underpin the gender pay gap. There are still more records to be broken. #genderpaygap #gendergap #genderlens #womenintheworkforce #genderequality #economics #labourmarket #ausecon

India’s Economy Has a Missing Engine: Women Especially women from lower-income backgrounds. A McKinsey study estimated that India could add $770 billion to GDP by 2025 by simply advancing gender parity in work. But instead, female labor force participation fell from 32% (2005) to ~20% (2020). https://lnkd.in/dvys4E6f Despite progress in some areas, female labor force participation in India is among the lowest in the world, even lower than some Sub-Saharan African countries. Why Are So Many Poor Women Underemployed or Not Properly Utilized? 1. Social and Cultural Barriers • Deep-rooted patriarchy restricts women’s mobility, especially in rural or conservative areas. • Girls are often seen as temporary earners, their “real role” is expected to be at home. 2. Safety and Mobility • Public transport is unsafe or unavailable, making it harder for women to travel to work. • Fear of harassment, especially in cities or during night shifts, keeps families from letting women work. 3. Unpaid Labor at Home • Women spend hours daily doing unpaid work: cooking, cleaning, child care, elder care. • This invisible labor is neither recognized nor redistributed. • Poor women, in particular, bear the double burden of poverty and gendered expectation. 4. Lack of Suitable Jobs - There is no structured pathway from informal to formal employment. 5. Policy & Structural Failure • Skill development programs often don’t reach women or are too generic and disconnected from market realities. • No large-scale, nationwide push for rural women entrepreneurship, decentralized production, or employment guarantees for women. • Schemes exist, but access is broken due to middlemen, corruption, or lack of information. Poor women: • Walk miles for water • Raise children with limited resources • Cook without clean fuel • Manage micro-budgets like CFOs of households Yet the system never sees them as ‘employable’ or ‘productive’. What Can Change This? 1. Localized employment: Bring dignified work to villages (e.g., food processing, crafts, decentralised manufacturing). 2. Safe, affordable transport: So women can commute without fear. 3. Women-led cooperatives and micro-enterprises: Let women own their work, not just participate. 4. Recognition of unpaid work: Design policies around time poverty, not just joblessness. 5. Mindset shift: From “allowing” women to work to realizing they hold the key to national growth. We talk of “demographic dividend” but leave half the population on the sidelines. A country that sidelines its women isn’t just unjust, it is chronically underperforming.

Surveys suggest that fathers fear disadvantages in the labor market, which prevents them from taking parental leave. But is this fear justified? Find out in our new discussion paper "Parental Leave and Discrimination in the Labour Market" (joint with Julia S., Clara Welteke, and Doris Weichselbaumer): https://lnkd.in/ejBRKC7G Based on a large-scale field experiment, we analyze whether fathers and mothers face #discrimination in the hiring process based on their #parental leave in three different occupations. We find that: --> Fathers who took parental leave in a female-dominated or gender-neutral occupation are not less likely to be invited to a job interview compared to fathers who did not take leave. However, in the male-dominated occupation, fathers who have taken long (not short!) parental leave are penalized. --> There is clear evidence for strong #gender discrimination in hiring, irrespective of parental leave: Fathers are treated less favorably than mothers in the female-dominated and the gender-neutral occupation, while the opposite is true for the male-dominated occupation. --> This suggests the presence of strong gender norms concerning the perception of ideal employees in different occupations. Thus, although we find evidence of discrimination due to parental leave for fathers, discrimination due to gender is considerably higher and present in all three occupation types. Since gender discrimination often arises from social norms about gender roles in the family and the labor market, encouraging more fathers to take parental leave - and thereby "normalizing" their involvement in family care - could help reduce both discrimination against fathers who share caregiving responsibilities with their partners and gender discrimination in general. DIW Berlin - German Institute for Economic Research Berlin School of Economics University of Potsdam Johannes Kepler Universität Linz

When men step into caregiving roles, they begin to understand the systemic barriers women face daily. Globally, women perform over three times as much unpaid care work as men, totaling 12.5 billion hours every day. Valued at minimum wage, this equals $10.8 trillion annually — more than three times the size of the global tech industry (Oxfam). In countries where caregiving is shared and publicly supported, #women are freer to pursue economic and leadership opportunities. In Iceland, both mothers and fathers are entitled to six months of paid parental leave at 80% of their salary under a “use it or lose it” policy. This has led to more women returning to the workforce after maternity leave. Combined with heavily subsidized childcare, these policies help reduce the “motherhood penalty” — a major driver of gender inequality that accounts for 80% of the gender pay gap (World Economic Forum). In 2020 alone, over 2 million mothers left the workforce, contributing to a sharp drop in women’s labor force participation (ILO, via WEF). But when governments and families share the responsibility of care, women are empowered to stay in the #workforce, lead, and thrive. Transforming norms of masculinity and investing in shared caregiving are not just #gender issues — they are economic necessities. Only by sharing care can we build a future where everyone has the freedom and #opportunity to lead. #economicempowerment

In a world of volatility and increasing protectionism that is likely to damage many national economies including that of the UK, there is one untapped resource that very few in government are talking about. Women. The @UN states that if we closed the gender gap it could add $7trillion to the global economy Sadly the UK dropped one place in the rankings to 18th in PWC’s annual Women in Work report this year, but there are glimmers of hope. Women’s participation in the workplace has increased adding approximately £6.2bn to our economy. Let’s face it we need it! If we continue to see sustained increases in participation rates, by 2030 it would amount to an additional £43.5bn. So why aren’t we talking about it more? Unpicking this puzzle is complex. Women need readily available and affordable childcare. In many parts of the country this is a pipe dream. We also need employers that recognise they need to step up on reproductive health, fertility, maternity, parenting, caring and menopause. And it’s not just women, men also need support for mental health, parenting and caring. Implement changes like these takes commitment and a change in perspective, something many organisations will need a legal nudge on. The other side to this in the current climate, is the increasingly worrying misogynistic narrative, which is filtering into British politics as well. The steady drumbeat of comments is normalising hate speech, sexist and threatening behaviour and limiting women’s careers. If we are to gain the economic benefits of women being in work, we need to create the environment where they can join, choose to stay and prosper. In an environment where our economy needs us to maximise every opportunity, surely this is something we can and should address?

There's a lot of effort dedicated to increasing the proportion of women in men-dominated fields, but comparatively less effort dedicated to increasing the proportion of men in women-dominated fields. One explanation for men’s resistance to entering women-dominated fields has been that women-dominated fields tend to pay less than do men-dominated ones. In fact, some research suggests that as more women join a field, compensation goes down. New work by @Eileen Suh Evan Apfelbaum Michael Norton published in Organization Science finds that it isn’t lower pay per se that discourages men from going into women-dominated fields, but rather, concerns about status. That is, even if a women-dominated job paid as much as a men-dominated job, men would still avoid women-dominated jobs because they don't want to be seen as lower status. To demonstrate this effect, the researchers used the “results” of a career development inventory to justify identifying that the participant’s ideal job would be either a job that was stereotypically feminine (e.g., executive secretary) or stereotypically masculine (e.g., a computer systems administrator). Men were more likely to rate the feminine job as lower in status than the masculine job than were women. Men were therefore less interested in the assigned job, even though it was described as being ideal for them, given their answers on the career inventory. More compelling, the researchers identified two jobs that are not currently seen as inherently gendered – workplace productivity analyst or AI ethicist – and described them as being either feminine or masculine. They then again asked participants to complete the career inventory and reported that the analysis of their answers indicated that they would be a good fit for one of the two jobs. Men told that they would be well suited to a feminine job were significantly less interested in learning more about the job than when that same job was described to them as masculine. They also rated the feminine job as being lower status than the exact same job described as masculine. This difference did not manifest for women, who were equally interested in the job regardless of how it was described, and who also did not see status differences between the jobs based on their femininity or masculinity. If what we want, socially, is for men and women to be seen as equal in status, then we shouldn’t only be focusing on making higher status jobs – read: masculine jobs - more accessible to women. Rather, we need to also – or perhaps instead? – focus on making feminine jobs as high status as masculine jobs. And the present findings indicate that merely increasing pay for those jobs is not sufficient to address the status concerns that men have about taking feminine jobs; it is truly about the respect and esteem we hold for jobs like nursing, teaching, and other more communally-oriented careers.

🌍 Where Women Work: A Global Perspective 👩💼 Why do some countries have higher female workforce participation than others? The data from the International Labour Organization (2025 estimates) reveals an interesting trend: 🔹 High participation in very poor countries 💡 In low-income nations, women often work out of necessity—especially in subsistence agriculture. Here, employment isn’t always a choice but a survival strategy. 🔹 A dip in middle-income nations 📉 As economies industrialize, traditional gender norms and social expectations can create barriers, leading to lower female labor force participation. Cultural factors and lack of workplace support often play a role. 🔹 A rise again in wealthier nations 💼 In high-income countries, education, childcare services, and flexible work policies help increase female participation. The shift to service-based economies also opens more opportunities. 💡 The Takeaway? Economic development alone doesn’t guarantee women’s inclusion in the workforce—it’s also about policy, culture, and access to support systems. The countries that truly empower women to work aren’t just growing economically—they’re also removing barriers that prevent participation. #WomenAtWork #GlobalTrends #Economy #GenderEquality #Workforce #FutureOfWork #Inclusion #Sustainability #EconomicDevelopment #WomenEmpowerment (📊 Data Source: Visual Capitalist)

🚨 The great exit: College-educated mothers of young children are leaving the labor force. 🚨 After the initial shock of the pandemic, mothers with young children drove record participation of prime-age women in the US economy. Those gains are now reversing. Key takeaways from my new research include: 🔸 Supply-side shortages in childcare are clashing with elevated demand. The result is large price increases. Since August 2024, prices for daycare and preschool have increased around two times the pace of overall inflation. 🔸 One result is that more Americans are either working part-time or missing work due to childcare problems. My Parental Work Disruption Index shows that the disruptions are up 20% compared to the pre-pandemic baseline. 70% of those affected are women aged 25-44. 🔸Another result is that many are leaving the labor force. Women with a BA or higher whose youngest child is under 5 had the largest decline in labor force participation from December 2023 to August 2025 (-2.3 percentage points on a 12-month moving average basis). Women with no BA whose youngest child is under 5 had the second largest decline (-1.14 ppts). 🔸Since December 2023, college-educated women with no children or whose youngest child is between 5-18 years old have posted gains in participation. Only the rate of those whose youngest child is under 5 has dropped. This is due to the effects of childcare shortages and high prices, RTO policies and unsupportive workplace cultures. 🔸Men whose youngest child is under 5, both with and without a BA, have increased their participation in the labor force over this same time period. This illustrates that the childcare crisis is continuing to disproportionately affect women and their labor market outcomes. Labor markets are expected to be tight in the years ahead due to retiring baby boomers, low birth rates and curbs on immigration. The childcare crisis is adding additional stress to the labor supply. Workers lose income, financial stability and career growth opportunities. Businesses lose productive and experienced workers and see a rise in employee burnout. The US economy as a whole grows more slowly. Employers can gain an edge over competitors by understanding the stresses on the labor market caused by the childcare crisis and who is disproportionately impacted. Childcare is not an individual or personal issue; it is an economic and business imperative. For more insights and to look at the data, read the full article below.

Why is India, the world’s fastest-growing major economy, leaving its women behind? A common belief holds that growth supports gender equality. As countries grow richer, labor markets tighten and women enter paid work in larger numbers. But India challenges this view. The chart shows gender gaps in labor force participation widening as income rises. Unlike Brazil, Mexico, or Indonesia, India’s growth path coincides with declining female participation while male participation stays high. A new paperw from the Yale Economic Growth Center (linked in comments) documents this pattern in detail. The evidence shows growth alone does not deliver gender convergence. What are the reasons? The drivers go beyond traditional gender social norms. The labor market itself fails to meet the aspirations of a changing workforce. Women in India are more educated than ever, yet job creation concentrates in roles misaligned with their skills, expectations, and need for safety and stability. The modern, salaried service jobs that these women are qualified for aren't being created fast enough. Rising household incomes add a further effect. As men’s earnings increase, families gain the option for women to withdraw from paid work. This choice reflects job quality. Long commutes, safety risks, and low wages reduce the net return to work. When effort and risk outweigh pay and dignity, staying home becomes the rational outcome. Would recommend a read of this paper. It reminds us that GDP growth does not resolve gender inequality on its own. Progress depends on the type of jobs created, the conditions attached to work, and how households respond to economic change.